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Championship Manager 2007 (CM2007) is the latest release in the Championship Manager series of soccer club management games. It is not only much more stable, but it also adds numerous new features and updates to the last release. Among those features and updates are the ProZone tool for replaying matches in greater detail, updated player rosters, and a "team talk" screen that you can use to increase or accidentally decrease your team's morale before and during the match. All these updates add to the gameplay quite a bit and make the experience more immersive.Gameplay: Lists, Ledgers, and Matches Simulation games of all sorts have been popping up in the last few years. There have been city builders, tycoon games, even wildlife preserve games. Most of them are a little entertaining and can keep your attention for a few weeks, but most don't manage to remain interesting. This makes CM2007 stick out, as it is a game you can play for years. With the never-ending seasons of the game and the ability to play as any team in any league of the world, there's no end in sight. You can start out as a member of England's premier league and take the championship year after year, you can manage France's national team while you get fired from club after club due to inattention, and you can help a club on the lowest level of the rankings rise to the pinnacle of success. No game is ever the same.Starting a new career is pretty simple. You create a profile for yourself with your birthday, your name, your favorite club, the club you're starting at, and then jump right in. As each game day passes, you'll scout for new players for the team, create training schedules and tactics, keep your players happy and under contract, and coach the numerous games of the year. All these tasks are easy to understand and can be learned quickly. However, if you prefer to sit back and watch everything work, you can give your assistant manager more of your duties and use the "auto-select" tool for figuring out the best team setup for the matches. There are also a few built-in tactics, so you don't need to get creative if you don't want to. When you get up to your first match you might find it a little daunting. You have to pick out a speech from your choices, decide whether or not to speak personally to single players, choose which players to man mark, and pick the tactics for the match. However, you can usually just experiment for the first few games of each season, as they're the friendly matches that won't get you fired. What you'll soon find is that playing is easy, but winning is hard. This leads into my only complaint with the gameplay. Like CM2006, the last game of the series, there isn't a load function. You have to quit the game every time you want to load. This can get annoying if you are having trouble beating an essential match, as you need to go through the opening screens every time you want to load your game. This isn't as annoying as CM2006, though, as I was completely unable to locate any crash bugs in CM2007. You might have to load, but nowhere near as much. However, after quitting CM2007 you might experience minor slowdowns in other applications. CM2007 also includes another tool to help you avoid having to load. If you are having trouble figuring out where your team is failing, you can use the new "ProZone." In it you can take a close look at key plays, shots, and goals, you can fast-forward, rewind, and trace the angle of important shots, and you can get close to the action with the point-blank camera. This makes it much easier to see where your strategy isn't working and come up with an alternative that fits your problem.
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