Championship Manager 01/02
Xbox £44.99 SI/Eidos
This must be the first example of a four-star game that I don't think you should buy, unless there is no alternative. Championship Manager Season 01/02 - or Champman 3 to its friends - is a complex, detailed and thoroughly involving simulation of football management. The Xbox version looks and plays just like the hugely successful PC version. But that is both a blessing and a curse.
On the good side, because the Xbox has a built-in hard drive, console owners can finally sample the delights of this great game. On the down side, it is very frustrating to play with a handheld controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. SI could at least have nodded in the direction of console playability by, for example, letting users save a number of preset formations, such as home and away squads and tactics.
Further, while PC players can back up their precious game data, I'd worry about doing this on the Xbox, assuming it reaches the same sort of humungous size. And while CM3 is almost proud of its lack of fancy graphics and sound effects - there's a sort of reverse snobbery here - this means it doesn't exploit the Xbox's main strengths.
There are some minor limitations with the Xbox version. For example, you can only play three leagues at a time instead of 26, and there are not quite as many players. But the stats are up to date and, in all essential respects, this is the real thing. Xbox-owning football fanatics should snap it up.
However, if you already have a PC, buy the PC version rather than the Xbox version. And if you don't have either, you might find a suitable secondhand PC for little more than the cost of a new Xbox. (JS)
Starmageddon: Project Earth PC £29.99 Lemon/Mindscape
It's been so long time since we've seen anything on the Mindscape label, it's hard to recall what the last one was. Now a whole clutch of them has arrived, the first of which is Starmageddon.
Initial impressions are not promising, thanks to an excruciatingly long loading time which harkens back to Amiga days rather than the Ultra 66 DMA my hard drive promised and every other game seems to handle with ease. Nevertheless, once the game has loaded it does look rather impressive. Starmageddon is pure realtime strategy set in outer space, a bit like Homeworld but with resources to manage and a nifty 3D engine that never quite handles the action as well as you think it might.
The 3D effects are impressive, zooming effortlessly across large reaches of space and utilising true particle physics if the developer blurb is to believed. It also allows you to play three different battleplanes at once, which may have been done before (Earth 2150) but never in 3D. The gameplay may be more mundane, with two campaigns to choose from, consisting of the usual building, mining and researching chores but the action has sufficient panache to overlook the game's fundamental failing. Almost.
Unfortunately, this is a very difficult game to play. The enemy always seems to have greater command of the Z-axis than you, swooping out of the dark and strafing your ships while you fumble around with the camera desperately trying to lock on to a target. Somehow the ability to set fleet formations pales before your inability to set "moods", with your units happily allowing themselves to be blown to bits unless you directly order them to fight back or take evasive action. Once you master the roving camera, you will undoubtedly start winning battles, but it's easy to see why the big developers consistently avoid 3D engines in games of this sort. It's never as easy or fulfilling as it looks on paper. (MA)
Crash
Xbox £39.99 Rage
British developer/publisher Rage is in a bit of a fix, having just announced a shares issue to raise cash. So it desperately needs Crash, its latest game, to achieve decent sales - while Microsoft desperately needs triple-A games to encourage more people to buy Xboxes. Crash is a decent effort, but doesn't have the power and individuality to work miracles.
Anyone who played Destruction Derby on the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 will find Crash very familiar indeed. Its basic premise involves driving garishly painted hot-rods, muscle cars and performance cars around, smashing up opponents before they turn your car into a smouldering wreck. This has always been fun, but has been done ad nauseam.
Graphically, the game is impressive: the cars look wonderfully smooth and shiny until you begin taking chunks out of them. Rage has relieved the tedium of driving around in circles and deliberately crashing by including 36 challenges. Some of which are fun - particularly the bus-jumping, which requires judicious use of the nitro button, and the mission where you must avoid oncoming skittles and hit crates. But the Career mode is over too soon and, despite the ability for up to four people to play against each other, Crash provides little by way of replay value.
Rage may be over ambitious but it would be a crying shame if it disappeared off the map altogether. (SB)
