Welcome to Mobile Monday - Take the Weekend With You, the new weekly feature highlighting what's happening in the world of mobile gaming. Every Monday we will highlight, preview or review a new mobile game. With more and more powerful phones coming onto the market there's no reason why you can't enjoy a little extra gaming time while you're on the go and this feature will help you make the right choices about what games to keep in your pocket.

This week we take a look at Manager Pro Football 2008 from Ojom available for Series 60 (Symbian OS) phones (Nokia N90, Nokia N6230i, Sony Ericsson K800 and Samsung D600, for a complete listing go here). If you're a fan of English League football (soccer to you Americans) or just a fan of the sport in general then you might want to check out this game.

Being the Business Manager of Generation: Gamerz keeps me rather busy and the mere thought of playing a game where I had to manage the operations of a football club made me want to pass the game off to someone else. Luckily for me, no one else wanted it because Ojom, the makers of Manager Pro Football 2008, did an amazing job of making this management sim fun and light. As they should since this is now the third game in the series.

But it is much more than just light, quick fun, it is actually interesting and challenging and when I made it to the first league I was ecstatic, when I was relegated down to the second I was distressed. But that was nothing in comparison with how I felt after I got the sack for being relegated and 4 million GBP in debt.

 If you're not a football fan I can't really say that you will find this game interesting. Because in order to play the game you really need to know something about football/soccer. I can think of a couple people who would actually enjoy this game, one being a former keeper on a college team, another being CigDangle's father. What I didn't expect was that I would spend hours upon hours playing this game.

I wasn't so keen on the sound in the game and just turned if off eventually. The looping music was slightly annoying and if I were playing in a public place I would definitely not want the music and sounds to be going off as much as they did and annoy the people around me. The sounds aren't all that deep anyway - a looping piece of midi music and a few others. 

 The graphics on the game are quite good though. Considering that the resolution on many of these phones is around 176 by 208 pixels. Everything in the game was clearly readable and the action was watchable. Of course in the interest of time I was extremely glad to see that they included the ability to turn off the matches themselves so that you can pick your settings and let the match play through in a few seconds and get the results. If I were playing on a computer I might have been interested in watching some of the matches but not so much on a mobile screen. Of course some of you may actually want to watch the games and that is completely doable here.

The game itself is all about choosing the right team to do the job. But even before you get into the game and pick the team you want to manage (GO ManU!) you can sit and change all the names of all the players to whatever you would like them to be, real people, your favorite cartoon characters, the names of all of your bosses' girlfriends throughout your life.

 There's even a Help section that I didn't crack open until I started writing this, and had played through several seasons and finally won the first league. The Help file English isn't perfect but you get the point and can understand what it's trying to tell you. But if you really need to read the help file to start playing this game then you might want to read through the whole thing. Personally I just experimented with it all and learned what seemed to work, that was more fun for me.

When you first start, you can pick which British team you want to manage from 60 teams. It looks like there might have been some rights issues as there are teams like Arsenia but almost every other city and town has a team. As you probably guessed, I played as Manchester. I had to laugh when I played against Swindon or Slough because I imagined the crew from The Office on the pitch for the matches.

Once you have your team, you're up and running. You have to decide on factors like players, training intensity, tactics and aggressiveness and method of play: defensive, normal, offensive and crowbar which is where you basically have your offense in the other teams box at all times. But that's not it, you can also edit ticket prices, add standing room, seats and VIP boxes as well as buy, sell, loan and borrow players. Now if you find yourself not being very successful in your first couple games then you need to dip into the information pool and check on some things before you find yourself in a financial hole and get the sack. The information options are quite thorough and give you a general idea of how you stack up strength-wise against the other teams as well as how you're doing financially.

Overall I was astounded at how much time I was willing to push the buttons and read the text. The first day alone I put in around 5 hours. The nice thing is that when you turn off the match sequences you can get through several matches in a matter of minutes. Perfect if you're on the tube heading into the office or waiting for the boss to finish a meeting before it's your turn in the hot seat. But be warned, as the manager of the football club, you're always in the hot seat

Summary: Great if... If you're a fan of football/soccer or sports sims in general and have a phone capable of playing this then you should seriously consider picking it up. This game would be a great addition to your mobile gaming selection and is strong enough to stand on its own. I would probably end up playing this from time to time when commuting. If I wasn't a fan of either then I probably wouldn't be at all interested in this game and if that describes you then you might not be either. But like I said, it pulled me in when I wasn't expecting it to.

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