Stockport County inching local rivals Manchester United to the Premiership title. Peterborough reaching the UEFA semi-finals. Ronaldo signing for Rochdale in a world-record deal. As anyone who's ever stood under an umbrella in the away end of a ground 100 miles from home, watching their team slump into relegation mire will know, some would pay anything to see these kinds of fantasies made real. Well, spare yourself the pain of earning a personal fortune only to flush it down the swanny by joining the board at your local football club. For a measly 40 quid, Championship Manager will let you recreate that rare pleasure in almost every detail.

This is an Xbox-exclusive revision of the famous franchise, bringing all the teams and players up to date as of the start of the current season, as well as introducing the South Korean league and the new UEFA transfer window.

Championship Manager sucks you in by laying out almost the entire footballing world in front of you. Every player - professional or otherwise - from practically every discovered country in the world is accurately rated here.

Every single team, be it Bournemouth or Burkina Faso, have spot-on lineups. It's quite possibly the most impressive piece of research since the Magna Carta.

As manager of the club of your choice, you soon realise the magnitude of the task that confronts you. Intricate menus allow you to peruse and tinker with everything from your club's training methods to the tactics of the reserve team. From squad numbers to penalty takers, from marking duties to passing style - if you want to do well, it all needs to be seen to before the first ball is even kicked, and simply deciding your first 11 can take hours.

To achieve all of this there are labyrinthine menus and stat screens to be negotiated. Thankfully, the developers have done a good job tailoring the interface around the Xbox controller, with the shoulder buttons scrolling lists up and down, and the choice of moving the cursor as you would a mouse with the Left thumbstick, or using the D-pad to skip from button to button on the screen.

Once you're at home with where everything is, and when you've finally set out your team structure, the matches start coming thick and fast. The action on the pitch is conveyed by a brutally simple text box that sits above a see-sawing possession bar. You can pause this at any time to tweak your formation or throw on a sub or two, and menus can be called upon to tell you how each of your players is performing.

How a flashing bar with a few words written on it can be so utterly captivating is one of the wonders of the Western world. Your face feels a magnetic attraction to the screen as long as that ceaseless, silent punditry is ticking over.

It's an embarrassing state of affairs that a grown man should ball his fist and snarl in delight as a message pops up telling you the winner's gone in. But that's what it's like.

Let Championship Manager into your life and you could suddenly find no room for anything else. Hours, days and weekends fly by. Just as you think you've got your team perfected, a couple of long-term injuries prompt another painstaking search through the lower divisions for a cut-price replacement. Football is a cruel mistress. As was the neglected bride who cited Championship Manager in court as grounds for divorce from her addicted husband. No kidding.

It's not what you bought your beloved Xbox for, and it doesn't break any new ground over its predecessor, released earlier this year. But, if you're a big football fan and new to all of this, you might just have found the thing to fill up all that time between matches on the telly. But make no mistake, if you don't know your offsides from your long-ball sides, you can give this a nice, wide berth.

1. Up-to-date stats
2. Tried and tested game engine
3. Will keep fans interested for ages

1. Only for football die-hards
2. Same game as ever

Power
You couldn't tax your Xbox any less, but save games will take up a sizeable chunk of your hard drive.

Style
Endless text and stats? It's no oil painting... and oil paint drying will be more diverting for rugby fans.

Immersion
Deeper than any management game, on any format. Think you know a lot about football? Wrong!

Lifespan
When the Champ Man bug bites, you'd better stock up for the winter. You're not going anywhere.

Summary
It's the best player on the park, but if you've got the 20-02 version you might feel updated stats don't justify your £40.