Much easier than wading up and down through three or four levels of static screen menus. Want to check out who's left in the English Conference Cup? Just click on "competitions," drag down to England, then to the Conference Cup tab and click on it. So, CM 3 is a detailed game, but how do you drive it? In previous versions, there was a clumsy amount of clicking through menu screens, but in CM 3 you can navigate by new (but hardly revolutionary) pull-down menus on the left side of the screen. If you're not a patient person, or details bore you, then Premier Manager Ninety Nine is more likely to be your thing. An indication of the sheer weight of statistics maintained here comes in the fact that a CM 3 savegame runs to around 50MB of disk after just two seasons of play. The price for this raising of the stats ante is horsepower - I would not recommend running Championship Manager 3 on anything less than a 64MB Pentium II, particularly if you're operating more than one national league concurrently, even while using the new feature of running matches in the background. Sadly no Major League Soccer from the US - though rumour has it the Americans wanted too big a fee for the license. And unlike previous versions, you now get 15 national leagues out of the box, namely Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, Spain and Sweden. The core game engine remains the same, but you can immerse yourself even deeper into the ocean of statistics that the game generates with each and every week of matches that are run. In brief, it sticks with the plain text approach, so no in-game graphic highlights, but adds a bootroom full of new features and options. There were add-on and update packs for CM2, including the popular CM 2 97/98 Edition, but for a good three years now soccer fans have been wondering what the next revision of the series would offer.
I'm a self-confessed soccer grognard, and that's the underlying reason why I believe Championship Manager 3 has cemented the Collyer brothers' position as kings of footie sim designers. Was it more realistic? Generally, yes, but it was the attention to detail that truly won me over. I had lost faith in the level of realism in the series, and CM 2 offered a much richer level of detail. It wasn't until 1995, when Premier Manager 3) took to the field against Championship Manager 2 that I defected. Initial versions of both were rough, but despite their flaws they were still addictive, and I must say the lack of match highlights in Championship Manager turned me over to the side of Premier Manager.
Back in the early 90's, there were only two real contenders for my gaming money - Championship Manager and Premier Manager. As a lifelong footie fan, if you call Plymouth Argyle a football team, I've always had that burning desire to manage a soccer club to greatness, to be an armchair Arsene Wenger.
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