 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Championship Manager 5" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(December 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
| Championship Manager 5 | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developers | Beautiful Game Studios Gusto Games (PS2, Xbox)[3] |
| Publisher | Eidos Interactive |
| Series | Championship Manager |
| Platforms | Microsoft Windows PlayStation 2 Xbox |
| Release | Microsoft WindowsPlayStation 2, Xbox |
| Genre | Sports |
| Mode | Single player, |
Championship Manager 5 is the fifth installment of the popularChampionship Manager offootball managementsimulation video games. It is the first game in the series to be developed by Beautiful Game Studios after the much publicised split betweenEidos Interactive andSports Interactive.
The game was originally due for release in October 2004; however, the release date slipped to March 2005 due to difficulties in coding the game from scratch. This allowed new rival, Sports Interactive'sFootball Manager 2005, a clear run to establish itself ahead of the release ofChampionship Manager 5. A release on theMacintosh platform was cancelled prior to release, again giving headway to its rivalFootball Manager, which was made available for Mac as standard on adual format CD-ROM (with thePC Windows version).
Upon its release, the game contained an unusually high number ofbugs. Even though Beautiful Game Studios published a downloadablepatch on the day of release, many users felt thatChampionship Manager 5 was unplayable. Key problems included difficulties transferring players (either in or out of a club) and a very unrealistic match engine. Perhaps one of the biggest issues discovered by people purchasingChampionship Manager 5 was that the player database was not particularly reliable. The database had been made "for the fans by the fans" in previous games and was probably the biggest strength of theChampionship Manager brand. Beautiful Game Studios had employed a professional firm to create much of the player database and they had apparently failed despite the best efforts of the in-house research team.
Other issues arose shortly after CM5 was released. Features likehotseat multiplayer games, which had been confirmed as being included in the game, disappointed some by their absence when the game arrived. Other small things such as player histories were also missing from the final product. Two patches are available that contain significant improvements to the game.
A scaled-down version ofChampionship Manager 5 was released onXbox andPlayStation 2 in March 2005 along with aPlayStation Portable version, simply calledChampionship Manager. These are known to contain many of the same bugs and data errors as the PC version. All three console versions were developed by Gusto Games.
