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Whatever your personal feelings about boxing; whether you feel it's a barbaric and exploitative sport that has the same effect as a particularly nasty gang fight, or whether you're just plain stupid, be assured that World Championship Boxing Manager features a marked lack of on-screen violence.

As the somewhat disreputable manager of a group (clutch? casualty ward?) of boxers, you spend most of your time flitting between a selection of menu screens, setting up matches, making sure your boys are in the peak of condition as well as juggling the finances. The actual fighting occurs surreptitiously in the wings, reported blow-by-blow by a couple of ringside commentators. Thank goodness for that, eh?

What a stunning idea. Take a footy management game, throw out the footy and insert a couple of prizefighters instead. The most amazing thing is that it works. Concentrating on one boxer, or taking a camp of up to five, really gets you involved with the pixellated pugilists and adds to the suspense during the punch-ups themselves.

Gameplay has, on the whole, been professionally tweaked to a high standard - you make all the usual training/financial/desperate life-or-death decisions with all the usual click-on-the-pretty-picture menus, but the whole thing hangs together very well.

You might find yourself cheering along enthusiastically when your boxers manage to win - or even sob quietly into your woolly jumper when they crash defeated onto the canvas in the fifth round. Depends on what your temperament is really.

Possibly the only real complaint, apart from the speed of the thing (it's somewhere between sluggish and salted sluggish) is the mindbogglingly offensive animation of your buxom secretary as she retrieves the boxers' files. Apart from that, it's only worth a smack around the head or two, or something like that.