Championship Manager Quiz

More Wycombe Wanderers than Manchester United.

Championship Manager, the most exciting spreadsheet in the world. Or so it would appear, certainly if sales figures are to be believed. By that standard playing with virtual Barbies is the height of computer entertainment, but as usual, I digress. Before Champ Man 4 gets released later this year, Eidos have unloaded Championship Manager Quiz. No doubt to improve the public’s perception of gaming and nothing to do with the marketing dream of combining the phenomenally successful CM series with the obvious appeal of answering questions on a monitor, as so pervasively demonstrated by Who Wants To Waste Time and The Weakest Excuse. The suits at Eidos are no doubt waiting for this title to claw in the dough. While it’s unlikely that the targeted purchasers - the infirm, weak-minded, grannies and David Beckham - are unlikely to be reading these fine pages I hope that I might be able to prevent one or two of you wasting money better spent on more rewarding gaming experiences. Such as a deck of cards.

Breathing in the whiff of shareware simplicity that is the menu screen the player is presented with a wealth of quizzing options. Or a total of five game modes to be precise. There are two each for the single- and two-player selections, with the Exhibition game mode being common to both. The solitary football genius can opt to try out the Keepie-Up mode while those blessed with a friend who is also into their footie can choose to duke it out in a Penalty Shoot-Out. The final game category is the Pub Quiz, perhaps the most redundant of all the choices on offer and no doubt tacked on a the end of the development cycle to flesh out the menu screen.

This mode involves a sequence of questions with four possible answers being displayed on the screen. I gather the intention is for a quiz master to read out each question to a mass of eager friends before clicking on the fantastically designed ‘next question’ button until everyone is bored enough and with a click of the ‘answers’ button the answers will make themselves known. Needless to say the three people in the room when I looked at this got no further then the third question before it was decided that searching out a member from the local Assemblies of God church and signing up to their pseudo cult would be a more entertaining and rewarding way to spend any time at all.

Unable to resist the temptation to have my eyes treated once again to the splendour of the menu screen, I thought it time to try out the single player games, not wanting to scare away my potential opponents for the two-player games so soon after the thrill of the pub-quiz. Keepie-Up sounded like a hoot, so I plunged into it with the enthusiasm of a pissed-up Sunday leaguer going through a messy divorce. Answer the question right, you get another one, answer it wrong, you don’t. Can you keep it up and beat the high score table? Can you be arsed? I surely couldn’t, so decided now was the time to tackle the Exhibition match full on.