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Championship Manager 2006 (CM06) is a "football" simulator from Europe. It's basic premise is that you're an up-and-coming soccer manager looking to have a good career. The game simulates every soccer league in the world and does a reasonably good job of it. It is loaded with features, most of which work flawlessly, and is definitely a big improvement over the previous games in the series.I've never played a sports simulator. I've also never played or watched a soccer game in my life. Needless to say, Championship Manager 2006 seemed a little daunting for the first day or two of playing. Once I got going, however, I found the game to be quite entertaining and very challenging. The only things that truly turned me off to the game were the frequent crashes. If you play a month of gametime, you're almost guaranteed to crash at least once. If you remember to save it won't be a problem. If you don't, the crashes will make you tear your hair out. Gameplay: Enjoy yourself, save often. CM06 is a highly entertaining game once you learn how to play. However, it takes forever to learn and is highly unforgiving to those who aren't good tacticians. For instance, if you pick a strategy that has most of your players on the goal's side of your field, you'll lose control of the midfield and your opponent's side. If you put most of your players on the offensive side, you'll score more often but fail to defend against even single players when they get through. You also need to choose the positions on the field, the direction your attackers will run, and the direction your players feed the soccer ball. It doesn't end there. You can issue directions to your team for where to kick the ball on a free-kick, what mentality to play with, and much more. If you think that's too general, you can give instructions to individual players as well. There's a gigantic level of tactical customizability and you can often beat a better team if you match your tactics to theirs. Thankfully, if you don't feel up to choosing your own tactics, you can pick a computer preset formation. They aren't as effective, but most of them aren't flawed in any major way.It doesn't matter how good your tactics are if you fail at management, though. You'll need to constantly be searching for new players for your team, keeping your current players happy, adjusting the training schedules for injuries and fatigue, hiring competent staff, picking players for the matches, and keeping the club board happy. It's a lot to do, and any one area can spell doom for your success. If you don't keep upgrading your squad, you'll start losing games as your old players move on to better things. If you don't have good coaches, scouts, and physios, your team won't be in good fighting shape. It all takes time to learn, but it can be quite enjoyable to see a long season's worth of management lead your team to victory. There are many tools to help you out along your way. There's the player/staff finder which gives you a list of all the players or staff that match your selection criteria, there's the auto-pick feature for choosing team members, and there's the management confidence window that gives you up-to-date information on what the fans, the board, and the media expect of you. All of these tools are great help for the beginner and can make things easier on you as you play through the first few months of club competitions. It can take a while if you activate too many nations, though, as the game calculates every nation's game content and score every game day. If you've got twenty nations worth of games going on the same day, that's a lot of processing to do. On the plus side, you can watch all the games you want after the processing is complete. (I highly recommend the England Premier League games) It all sounds really good, and it is. Championship Manager 2006 is highly addictive and great fun to play... until you get hit by the first wave of crashes. However, before I start into the many crashes of CM06, I have to acknowledge how far the series has gone. In the early Championship Managers, you could hardly play for all the bugs. In CM06, you can go an entire season and never crash, if you're lucky. The problem lies in the fact that you rarely get lucky. The first of the major crashes happens randomly whenever you start an in-game match. This is extremely annoying if you haven't saved after the processing for the day is complete, as you'll have to wait for the game to process it all again. The other bug happens during the national leagues when you press the "continue" arrow. This is also random, but it doesn't seem as frequent as the match crash. Other than that, you may find a few values shifting after a reload, but nothing that truly affects the gameplay. If you remember to save often, you can enjoy yourself easily. It might have been helpful to be able to load after a bug gave you an eleven to zero loss, though.
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