When I wrote my review of Football Manager 2008 on the PC, I had all the joys and optimism of winter - my beloved Derby County were bottom of the Premier league, but within touching ground of the other clubs around them and everything was (comparatively) hunky-dory. Fast forward to the pessimism and misery of spring and Derby County have become the fastest team to be mathematically relegated in Premiership history - and here I am, expected to be all excited about playing make believe football management by squinting at the television, rather than squinting at my PC screen.

It may not seem like a particularly likely match at first - Football Manager, the world's favourite form of recreational spreadsheet entertainment, and the Xbox 360, better known for having a slightly creepy Soldier of Fortune reader-esque obsession with guns, but the series has managed to stick around for three years running, so a fanbase of statisticians and footballing geeks must be making their mark here somewhere, rather than insulting each other in Halo 3 deathmatches. And this is a good thing, because the game's heart and soul remains as addictive as Hobnobs, and it's great that a whole new demographic get to play something approximating the glorious 'second life' of the PC version. The key word there is 'approximating' however, because the truth is that Football Manager 2008 on the 360 remains inferior to the PC version, because the control system (while getting better with each attempt) still feels like more of an obstacle than an old friend.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I should really explain the concept of the game, both for those who can't be bothered to read my PC review and for those who can't work out that the clue is in the game's title, in much the same way that you can expunge a synopsis of the movie Snakes on a Plane from its moniker. In Football Manager 2008 you manage football teams… in 2008. Simple really (oh, and that's 'soccer' to you American readers, though I suspect that Sports Interactive have no plans for releasing it on your side of the pond due to projected sales figures lower than Derby County's number of points for the season - *sob*). You pick your team and try to improve their fortunes on the pitch via pages and pages of intimidating statistics that represent the personal and physical attributes of the staff you're managing. If you pick the right tactics, are wily in the transfer market and get a bit of luck then success will surely follow. If not then it's a job at a smaller club for you, m'laddo. As game concepts go, it's simple but devilishly moreish, and thankfully this hasn't been lost in translation to Microsoft's powerful console.

The changes in this year's version over last year's seem minimal on the surface, but they add up to create a far more well-rounded package. It's full of little details for you to obsess over - like being able to instruct your ground staff to make a thinner pitch to screw over teams that play with wide-men, and being able to request an increased budget if you guarantee promotion. There are also a greater number of teams to choose from, with squads updated for the current season, which makes the March release date a little odd; with only six Premiership games remaining when SI pushed this out of the door, you can't help but feel that they may have been wiser to wait until the summer to cash in on the latest big money transfers. Despite this, 360 gamers should be glad it's here, because the game is wonderfully addictive and immensely detailed - joyful when things are going you way and frustrating when they're not, just like real football. The 360 version also ships with 1000 achievement points that will take years to accumulate - they range from "win a match" all the way up to winning competitions and not losing a game all season, and should keep achievement point junkies busy for a good while to come. But even without the achievements, this is the best football management sim bar none, and Xboxers should be honoured that their console is its fourth home (after PC, Mac and PSP), even if the controls conspire to make it an inferior product to the desktop versions.

With the original game operating a series of drop down menus on a PC desktop and running via point and click mouse control, the 360 controller was always going to be a baffling transfer for me to get to grips with, but even I wasn't expecting the wealth of confusion that confronted me. After around fifteen minutes of utter bewilderment, followed by an hour and a half of trial and error getting to grips with things, I felt like I finally understood the intricacies of the control system. This may sound like a massive time investment, but it's hard to hold this against the game, because the PC version is almost as bewildering to newcomers as well - and in the greater scheme of things, two hours probably equates to far less than a percent of my total time invested (not wasted, I keep telling myself) on the game in its various forms over the years.

The development team have taken the sensible option of not just mapping the mouse to the analogue stick, which should be a relief to anyone who's even tried to use one for precision cursor movement. Instead, navigation of the various menus is handled by cycling through the players and stats using the left analogue stick and moving through options with the left and right bumpers, with the face buttons performing context-specific actions that are helpfully signposted at the bottom of the screen. However, even after grasping these control mechanics, you often find yourself battling against the counter-intuitive. The 360 controller has always been set out to make the A button one of the most natural to press, but at times here it doesn't seem to do the obvious thing. Half the time it will be used to confirm options, while the other half that duty will fall upon the right trigger, and the fact that this was still often tripping me up many hours into the game should be a cause for alarm. Worse still, you sometimes find yourself not confirming an action via the right trigger after selecting it, meaning that the action you've meticulously laid out doesn't happen - and you won't find out until you return to that screen. To be fair, the development team are obviously well aware of how baffling this must all seem to first timers and they have gone to quite endearing lengths to welcome newbies into the fold; an advice panel helpfully asking "what do you want to do?" is on by default until you tell it to go away and pressing the "back" button on the 360 pad brings up a lovely picture of the controller in your hand, showing you easily what every button does.

You'd better enjoy the picture of the controller by the way, because that's the most graphically intensive thing you'll see over the many months you'll invest in the title. I feel it's worth stating that loud and clear, because unlike the PC where Windows is the norm (and generously described as 'functional' and less generously described as 'well fugly'), 360 users are used to seeing graphical awesomeness from every facet. It must be quite a dramatic fall to earth, therefore, for an uninitiated 360 gamer to load this up for the very first time, only to be confronted with reams of text and boxes. As I said with the PC review, it feels cruel to have to place a number on Football Manager's beauty, but on the 360 where looks are more important, it's hard not to be critical. I wasn't able to test it, but I gather that the game loses further graphical points by not running the match engine (a top down bird's eye view of circles chasing a ball) in standard definition. I'm sure this is for the very best reasons, but it isn't going to help the more graphics-obsessed players come to terms with the 'beautiful game'.

As with the PC version, sound is virtually non-existent. Barring the match day sounds of cheering and generic chants, which are still understated and unobtrusive, the developers have also included a 'blip' noise when you press things. I have no idea why they've done this, but suffice it to say it neither adds nor subtracts from the sound score, which remains low - although it really doesn't need more. The day that Football Manager has music is the day I stuff so much cotton wool into my ears that I require serious medical attention. Besides, Xbox gamers have always been able to use their own soundtracks if the silence proves too much.

There are two ways of playing multiplayer Football Manager 2008 - online or offline. Offline was pain enough on the PC, where everyone takes it in turns to make their moves and could see you waiting for an inordinate amount of time to get your turn if your friends are obsessively weighing up different training schemes - and if anything it's worse here, because the control scheme slows everything down further. With that said, if you have enough time it's brilliant and splendid fun to bury your opponent in cheeky £1 bids for their best players. The really interesting area here is the new online play mode, which allows leagues of two to eight players or cups of one to four teams, with players allowed to select saved teams from their single player campaigns, a default squad or a fantasy team where everyone takes it in turns to pick a new player until they reach the maximum squad size. The last is easily the most interesting and creates something that is, if not a whole new ball game, intriguingly different. This is one game you're going to want to play with friends rather than random gamers though, because it can be a frustratingly laborious affair that's wide open to cheating and time wasting (familiar to anyone who has watched large amounts of League 1 football, then.) The trouble is that there is no time limit for tinkering with your squads, so you could theoretically be left waiting all day for the match to start. Worse still, during the matches themselves there are no rules about the number of times the game can be paused, which leaves you open to unsporting players pausing the game with a minute to go when they're 5-0 down. Despite desperately needing a referee (or a patch, I'm not fussy), the online multiplayer is an interesting new diversion that I intend to keep exploring.

So here I am, attempting to make conclusions over a generally solid port of a game that I awarded 9/10 to six months ago. The gameplay is as brilliantly addictive as ever, but it's that bit more awkward and fiddly that it sometimes makes the micromanagement that the series is famous for too frustrating to be worth bothering with. Actions that would take seconds for experienced players on the PC take a great deal longer on the 360, and these really do add up as it goes along. Plus, as the PC version could be played in a window, you could happily browse the Internet while the game number-crunched through its numerous 'processing' screens - an option that's naturally absent from the Xbox. With that said, if you don't have a PC that can handle it and you prefer the comfort of reading spreadsheets in the living room, or you're some kind of achievement point zombie, then there is nothing to stop you from investing in a copy of Football Manager 2008; just be aware that the experience you're having will always be slightly less fluid than that of your PC-owning friends.

Reviewed by Alan Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).