More Articles on Championship Manager 5
Console CM5 DatedChamp Man Heading To Handhelds?Exclusive: Championship Manager 5 Q&AEidos Announce CM5 DelayChamp Man 5 Xbox + PS2 ConfirmedLatest Features
Exclusive: Dawn of War 2: Eldar RevealedUK Exclusive: Lineage II Chaotic Throne Gracia FictionUK Exclusive: Dawn Of War II Q&A - Part 2The Bourne Conspiracy Dev Diary 4UK Exclusive: Dawn Of War II Q&AUser Reviews
There are currently 0 User Reviews for Championship Manager 5Write your own review for this game today and you will receive 100 Gamer Points.
Click here to register
Exclusive: Championship Manager 5 Q&A Feature
Derek dela Fuente
05/04/2005
Gusto Games discuss the transformation of Champ Man 5 to the home consoles...
The fortunes of the Championship Manager brand may have taken a slight wobble with the recent release of Championship Manager 5, however work continues unabated at Gusto Games on the Playstation2 and Xbox conversations.
While a football management console port may sound as appealing as watching Accrington Stanley on a wet Sunday afternoon, Gusto Games Managing Director, Simon Phillips, put us straight, talking to our die-hard Milwall fanatic, Derek dela Fuente.
TVG: Could you tell us what Gusto Games' individual members have worked on in the past and a little about your in-house expertise?
The core part of the team at Gusto isnât really newly formed to be honest, there is a group of six, including myself, that has been working together as a team for around 10 years, in that time weâve developed a lot of soccer titles dating back as far as the likes of Kick Off on the Amiga and Fever Pitch on the SNES through to UEFA Champions League on PS2. We also have some experienced guys that havenât made as many soccer games to make sure that we keep fresh and original in what we are doing.
TVG: What will be the differences between the Xbox and PS2 versions?
The Xbox has some cool features, like being able to record your own music, so you can play your favourite tracks when you playing, but essentially they are built from the same codebase.
TVG: Do you see the game as a port from the PC and what sort of compromises will be made? Is it all new code or essentially PC code?
When we started the console versions we did think about taking the PC code and porting it, but we didnât want to have the overheads that a PC can deal with in terms of memory, input controls, etc. We wanted to produce something that would maximise the tighter areas, so we started with new code. This means that we have squeezed a lot of data into the memory of the consoles and developed a new control system that feels natural to a joypad without having any of the legacies of mouse controls that would have come from using PC code.
TVG: Being heavily based upon data, the lack of a HDD in the standard Playstation2 has been cause for concern amongst many; will sacrifices be made to the PS2 build in respect to this, or perhaps the overall game (including Xbox/PC) has been changed significantly from the days of Sports Interactive?
We knew we werenât going to support the PS2 HDD from the start, which allowed us to spend our time making sure that we came up with some really clever ways of packing as much data as possible into the space available â“ again, and what I believe is different from the last Xbox version, is that we started the console version from scratch, so we didnât have to worry about how the PC game worked.
TVG: Naturally the lower resolutions of standard televisions has always made text-heavy games hard to grasp for the consoles, with many PC conversions suffering; how have you gone about rectifying this?
Yeah, this is a tricky area with a game like Champ! The PS2 and Xbox versions of the game were designed specifically around the fact that console owners will play on TVs, some good quality and some pretty poor, so none of the fonts or graphics have come from the PC version they have all been created specifically for the console version.
TVG: Many would say that the demographics of console gamers (particularly PS2) are completely different to that of a PC gamer; are you worried that a game such as CM5 will fail to impress an audience who are largely infatuated with action and high-tempo games?
Sure a lot of console owners want to run around and shoot things, why not? But a lot, and I mean a lot of people, love football, and people who love football generally love football management games, and a lot of these people have game consoles â“ with Champ Man we wanted to make sure that we created a great management game as apposed to a weak graphics demo! We were adamant that we wanted to use all of the memory for storing stats and players and teams and the important stuff, and not waste it on dodgy models of footballersâ latest haircuts â“ that will probably be out of date when you play the game anyway!!
TVG: How radical a change will the interface be and how tough is it to create an intuitive design to ensure controls are easy to use and remember, when games such as these are hard to replicate without a mouse?
The interface or look and feel of the game will be what a champ man player expects. Iâm a huge champ man fan and have been for years, everything is where I would expect it to be. We made sure that we didnât start coding with any kind of mouse style input; otherwise we wouldnât concentrate on how a console player would want to move around. The best way of creating a natural control system is sit with a pad in your hand and think, right, I want to move the highlight over to there, what do I want to press â“ and try it out. The new pad control is quick, easy and natural to use â“ hopefully youâll all be pleasantly surprised!
TVG: What would you say to ardent CM fanatics who view console conversions as a âdumbing-downâ of the franchise?
Donât! CM on a console? Fantastic! This means that I for one can finally sit on my comfy sofa and play it on my telly! CM Console is a console specific version that has been created by an experienced console team to push the capacity of the consoles to create quite a hardcore game!
Football management titles on the console market have a lot less competition than the PC; what sets CM5 on the consoles apart from the rivals, besides the obvious brand recognition?
As I think I mentioned before, what we have created with CM consoles is something that doesnât say âitâs a console game, so it must have 3D stadiums and fan-fares and real life commentatorsâ, thatâs rubbish! I want a management game so I want a deep, stat rich game that gets me immersed into my world. This is something that console owners havenât really had in management games before â“ if I want all the graphics and jazz then Iâll play an arcade style football game!
TVG: The Championship Manager series has notoriously stayed away from 3D match replays, although this seems more ideal to a console audience â“ could you foresee future CM console titles featuring 3D matches similar to the LMA series?
I think I just answered that one! Yeah, all of the trimmings would be nice, but only after the game was deep enough and the memory allowed. I want a good management game first where I can imagine things how I want to. The biggest problem I have with the 3D argument at the moment is that consoles arenât powerful enough to represent all of the diversity that a game a deep as Champ allows. We have tons and tons of players in CM, and I would be disappointed if they all looked the same!
TVG: Will you be making use of the online features of the consoles; perhaps to keep team data updated throughout the season or even allow rival managers to take on each other in friendlies perhaps?
More and more consoles are getting connected as we speak, especially the wireless portable ones (!!), and hopefully within the next year there will be enough players to do some really cool stuff with Champ. So watch this space!!
TVG would like to thank Simon for taking the time to answer our questions and eagerly look forward to seeing what the team has come up with when Championship Manager 5 is released on the Playstation2 and Xbox later in the month.
