Xbox Manager

Support for Microsoft's Xbox console continues to spread faster than foot and mouth disease, with Sports Interactive the latest company to announce their undying love for Bill Gates and friends. Soccer fans can now look forward to a new version of the ever popular Championship Manager football management sim for the Xbox, marking the first time that a version of the game has been released on a console.

"Championship Manager has never migrated to any console before - until now, the machine simply hasn't been built that could handle it", managing director Miles Jacobson enthused. "However, with its built in hard-drive, Xbox is more than capable of coping with the demands of a game like Championship Manager, and we feel that it is the right platform for us to be published for our first foray into the console market."

Strangely the lack of a hard drive hasn't stopped other football management sims from appearing on PlayStation, Dreamcast and other consoles in the past, but Sandy Duncan of Microsoft is understandably enthusiastic about the prospect of one of Europe's most popular sports franchises coming to the Xbox after ten years on PC. "Championship Manager is more than just a game - it's a way of life to the legions of wannabe coaches who devote their spare time to guiding their chosen team to the top of the table", he is reported as saying. Expect to see Championship Manager amongst the initial launch range when the Xbox arrives in Europe early next year.

Update - Since posting this story we have spoken to Miles, who pointed to the huge player database used by the Championship Manager series as the prime reason for the game needing a hard drive - information and statistics on roughly 90,000 players were included in the last version! "We didn't want to have to do a cut down version of the game as this wouldn't satisfy anyone, and [so we] decided to wait until there was a machine with the capabilities to handle the game", Miles told us. "Thankfully that day has now come."

Source - press release