Your reporter's last interaction with PC Zone magazine before it was assimilated into the evil, treacherous and corrupt Future Publishing empire was to suggest to it that he review the then-forthcoming new football management game, Football Manager (which was the "true" sequel to the inexplicably-popular Championship Manager series, of course). The thinking behind the idea was simple. Reviewing the game in the normal manner was an exercise in gargantuan pointlessness - existing fans would be certain to buy it anyway, whereas anyone who had resisted the series until now weren't going to suddenly be persuaded by the same old CM-fanatic reviewers banging on about it in exactly the same way they'd banged on about the previous editions.

Why not, then, give the review to a fresh face, someone who despite being a football lover had been bored to tears by the previous incarnations? The plan was to see whether, by grossly abusing the game's features, it could be made into something that would provide a bit of fun and entertainment for anyone other than spreadsheet-loving nerds. Teams comprising eleven left-backs would be fielded. 0-0-10 formations would be played. Strikers would be bought for £40 million then put in goal. Players with broken legs would be forced onto the pitch. And so on.

It was an everyone-wins scenario: the review could have turned out pretty funny, people who'd never previously bought a game in the series might have been persuaded to give it a try, the magazine would look daring and inventive, and all the idiot diehard fans would just ignore the review as not taking the game "seriously", so sales wouldn't have suffered.

Sadly, the editor declined the idea, and gave FM to the same old reviewer who'd reviewed all the previous CM games, who duly awarded it a pointless 90% - in a single-page review, due to the developer having taken a massive sulk about a harmless comment in an earlier preview - doing no good to anybody. It's what, in the trade, they'd call missing an open goal.