Cognito
£8.95 cass/£14.95 disk
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies
You'll have to excuse me if this review appears all disjointed, but I'm currently waggling my joystick with one hand and trying to absorb A Level Chemistry with the other. At times like this, even another football management game can seem quite appealing.
It's the garish packaging that first arouses suspicions though - the acreage of verdant playing surface, the chunky-thighed sportsmen, the bolt-on grinning celebrity and the autograph scrawled across the top. It's like a recurring nightmare.
In all fairness, Soccer Manager is actually quite good. As you may have guessed, it goes for the 'manager' style of game, rather than the more risky arcade type, and adds street cred through its use of icons and a pointer.
Presentation is faultless. The icons work slickly, avoiding the need to clutter up the screen with boring lists of options. Writing - who needs it, eh? Die-hard text enthusiasts will be relieved to see that team lists and fixture tables are retained in traditional script, though.
As for the underlying strategy, well unsurprisingly its very similar to the original Football Manager. Transfers, injuries. promotion, that kind of thing. You can also plan your team's playing formation before the match, to a limited extent. It doesn't have quite the complexity of the most recent 'manager' games, but it kept me happy for a while. There are none of the random "The team attends a Hari Krishna meeting and is enslaved for the rest of the season. You are out of the league" incidents that form the mainstay of some similar games, so things can begin to get rather routine after a while.
There are always the good old match highlights to liven things up, of course. These are nicely done but as usual they don't tell you anything that the results can't. Frequent use of the 'off' option is a wise move.
I think I've taken it fairly calmly. Churning out yet another footie game is just asking for terrible retribution, but to be quite honest Soccer Manager ts a good attempt, although it didn't quite "leave me breathless with its great features" as it claimed it would.
And better still, I got through a whole review without coughing up any football cliches. Smashing. Now, back to the joys of syndiotactic polymers and Van der Graaf generators...
BARGAIN BASEMENT
Torch? Check. Helmet? Check. Ability to write incredibly informative and witty reviews? Check. (Sort of.) Say hello to RICH PELLEY & JON PILLAR.
Zeppelin
£2.99
Reviewer: Jon Pillar
It's not hard to see why this was a 'Number One Bestseller' (as the inlay card so proudly puts it). Compared to the usual collection of sluggish number lists, Kenny's snazzy graphics and icons must have been a wonderful surprise. At heart, its a competent management game (featuring scouts, transfers, cup competitions, formation strategy, finance etc) but with a slinky presentation that makes all the difference.
One boon is that you dictate the speed of play. You can choose to see either the full results or edited highlights (which are a sort of updated version of the Footy Man goalmouth sequences), as well as opting for detailed information about each team member or just the bare bones.
There are also a quite few good ideas in the game itself, like the option to replace a booked or injured player with anybody else from your team. My personal favourite though is the boardroom icon. This is where you can check up on the team via the physio and the coach, ask the scout who's up for grabs in the player market, find out from the accountant how you're doing financially, beg the bank manager for a loan, and finally quail before the chairman as he demands to know why you're still in the 4th division.
There are only two problems. First, when you're clicking speedily through the various icons it can be all too easy to miss an important message. such as a player having been injured. And second, no matter how badly you do and how low the chairman's confidence sinks, at the beginning of each season it's replenished, so he never actually fires you (A bug?)
But these are only tiny points. Purists may frown upon the icons and graphics (and speed!) but by and large it's pretty hot poop. Go buy.
Label: Cognito
Author: In-house
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon
Talk about a bit of unfortunate timing! Kenny Dalglish Soccer Manager manages to appear after Georgie Graham's boys successfully win the league in the most dramatic way ever. In fact, I bet ol' Kenny's a bit sick.
Which goes some way to maybe explaining why Kenny's game seems a little bit lacking in enthusiasm and action. Well, I'll be honest, it's pretty poor. If this is the way that Kenny manages his boys, then it's a wonder they're as good as they are.
Unusual for this type of game, KDSM is fully icon controlled, and not your ordinary little monochrome icons either. These are large colourful portraits, designed to let you know exactly what it is you're selecting. For example, on the screen where you talk to members of the board, everybody is drawn in stereotype. The chairman is a fat, balding man with a tie and a serious expression. Your scout is a lovable chirpy cokney with a flat cap, and your accountant is a short jewish guy with glasses (well, mine is?)
Players are presented by name, position and ability. Ability is a score between 1 and 99, the higher the better. An average is worked out of the eleven players picked and this tells you how good your team is. A good score for a fourth division team is 50. It's interesting that you are never offered players with a score over 45 when buying from the transfer market (you get a choice of two players between every match by your scout), which basically means that it's impossible to get an average of more than 45.
The graphics are pretty hot throughout most of this game. As I've said, all the icons are large and very colourful and the backdrops are great too. The only thing I don't like in the entire game is the animated bit. As with almost every commercial football game at the moment (by commercial I mean non-mail order) you have the option to see highlights of the match. This consists of a monochrome view of the goalmouth with lots of large badly animated characters running around slowly. A ball jerks about the screen before curling past the goalie and bouncing into the back of the net. The crowd must have a pretty boring time as all the goals are scored the same way!
This game is only spoiled by the fact that it's rather repetitive. There seems to be no variety at all. You don't really have that much control over what happens. The simplicity of the game is probably to blame. While other games list a player's stamina, speed or shooting rating, all you get with KDSM is one measley ability rating, so you just don't feel like you're really getting involved. While the icon-control and playback features are worthwhile, a far greater sense of involvement would have been achieved had the players been endowed with more diverse or detailed attributes. Kenny Dalglish Soccer Manager could have been a good game, if it wasn't for the fact that there isn't much of a game in it. Nice piccys though.
Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £7.95, Diskette: £14.95
Yet another famous footy player has discovered that he can make more money endorsing a computer game than booting a spherical air-filled cow bladder up and down a nicely mown pitch. Kenny Dalglish is the gent in question, and (for the Spectrum) many games of this type have appeared since its birth, but sad to say this one barely manages to make it out of the training camp.
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