Football Manager 3

Sinclair User

Graphics 78%

Sound N/A

Playability 69%

Lastability 70%

Overall 73%

Alan Dykes

Philip Lindey 73%

Label: Addictive Memory: 48K/128K Price: £10.99 Tape, £15.99 Disk Reviewer: Philip Lindey Want some verbal abuse? Want to be insulted and belittled by the press? Feel like signing deals, chewing cigars and slicing the half time lemons for a team of your choice? From behind your desk you must select a team, organise the training schedules of your minions, but and sell players and organise times for the players to see the physiotherapist. Yes, the fun never stops in Football Manager 3. The game is controlled by keyboard or joystick. You select your own keyboard controls for; up, down, left, right and two 'fire' buttons. One of these work as 'Enter' (used to access an item), the other takes you 'back' a step. There are eight items represented on the office' screen; the door (exit stage left!), team training (represented by a framed picture of the team) and the board of directors (yet another framed picture of baldies on the wall). In front of you, on your desk, a telephone, a sheaf of memos, a diary and a computer, complete the list. Footie Manager 3, like all football management sims, is a game of judgement rather than joystick juggling skill as you plan your team's career and guide the club, with some clever wheeling and dealing, to the top. Don't forget your copy of the Sun mind you! Each player's skills and abilities are represented by a bar chart, by pressing on a particular skill and then pressing the 'right' directional key, you increase the amount of training that player undergoes in that particular skill. It is a slow job going through the whole team, picking out the particular skills needed by each individual player but this is the only way to field a tailor made (get it? Tailor... Taylor? Aggggh!) team. Sorting out the finances of the club is also a big job, you bgin with an overdraft facility from the bank, with which to by players. But remember that wages and expenses have to be paid too, so you mustn't leave yourself short. One of the best ways to make money is to buy cheap players, train them up to increase their value, and then sell them at a higher price. (It's slightly more glamorous than cattle farming). In the filing cabinet are the club's records. There are files on each plater, details of his contract with the club, its expiry date etc. Forgetting to renegotiate a contract will result in the player disappearing from your team. If this happens you will be sacked for fielding an illegal team. There are also records detailing the clubs performance, matches played, scores, and its position within the league. There are other sources of information, on the desk is a pile of memos for your attention, these are from various people, eg. the trainer, the talent scout etc. Graphics are o.k. But there's no sound to speak of. There is quite a lot of detail in Football Manager 3 but until you get used to it, the forwards-and-backwards menu system can get a little confusing. Although this title breaks no new ground in terms of layout or presentation I'm sure many fans of football sims will want to add it to their collection. However, for what it is, Football Manager 3 does seem a bit pricey.

Arsenal in the fourth division!

Inside the filing cabinet.

Planning the teams training.

The Managers office.

The diary, to keep you up to date.

The notorious Jim Jones is looking for a transfer.

Your Sinclair

Overall 70%

Stuart Campbell 70%

Addictive £10.99 cassette/£15.99 disk [redacted] Reviewer: Stuart Campbell As it says on the box of this game, '1 WAR WUNDERBAR, 2 WAR SCHRECKLICH UND 3 IST DIE ENDGULTIGE HERAUSFORDERUNG!' What? Oops, been reading the German instructions by mistake. What it actually says is '1 WAS WONDERFUL. 2 WAS TERRIFIC, 3 IS THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE'. What could they be talking about? The Alien movies? The Popeye games? The World Wars? (They're talking about the Football Manager games, stop being so ruddy stupid. Ed) Well, blimey. Another Speccy football management game, eh? Just what we needed. What next, I wonder? Football Manager Dizzy? Football Manager 3, the latest in a long line, has had nearly ten years to take the best aspects of hundreds of other footy management games and turn them all into one indisputable, unbeatable classic. What's it come up with? Well, you get to pick your team, and choose which style they play in. You can buy other players, by ringing up their manager on the telephone and offering him lots of money - realistic or what? You can train all your players individually, so that some of them are really good and some of them are really crap (or something). You can, er, switch on a desktop computer and, um, see what games you've got coming up in the next few weeks. Or - AHA! - you can actually play a game and watch the action unfold in from of your eyes! Brilliant! Let's get on with it, then! SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS Oh dear. The match sequence in Football Manager 3 consists of a tiny little rectangular pitch occupying about half of the screen, (with no centre circle or penalty-box arcs, natch) covered in little stick players even smaller than the ones in the original Football Manager, which all lurch around colour-clashing horribly. This is accompanied by a fantastic commentary along the lines of 'Number Six has the ball', 'Number Ten goes in for the tackle', 'Innes shoots', 'Graeme souness gets sent out from the dugout' and all that kind of thing. It is, frankly, crap. But, hey, it's not all bad. Apart from the rubbish match sequence, Football Manager 3 is all right, as far as this kind of thing goes. It's not quite up to the standard of Football Manager 2, to be honest, with vastly inferior presentation and graphics, and lots of hanging around while the computer thinks and doesn't seem to be working properly. Still, it's got enough statistics and stuff to be passably realistic, without having so many that you get completely lost in a maze of menus and totally bored. The front end leaves a lot to be desired, but I did really like the way it said 'Hello!!!' as its program name when it loaded up. So, swings and roundabouts, really.

"I'm bored! Yeah, I'm the chairman of the bored!" So sung the truly great Iggy Pop once. And d'you know what? He was probably right as well.

Harry had this strange recurring nightmare. Every night he dreamed that he was a large green baize square which seemed to attract men with a certain haircut.

In the year 2023 footballers will be all the same colour. The FA are urging the European community to introduce a measure which will simplify the commentator's job.

Miles Grant was getting on. He was at least ten years older than most of his team-mates. Mind you, he was loads better at dribbling than most of them. That's old ago for you.

Not many footballers are in unions. If they were, they'd probably have gone on strike by now. They have a blimmin' hard time, y'know. I mean, look at the amount of rest they get - it's pitiful.

FOOTBALL MANAGER 3 - JUST WHY HAS IT GOT SUCH A BLIMMIN' BIG BOX, THEN? The most interesting thing of all about Football Manager 3 is probably its packaging. As well as a tape containing both the Speccy and Amstrad versions of the game (don't try and load the Amstrad version then come back ten minutes later and wonder why nothing's happened, like I did) and a tiny little bit of folded paper containing the instructions, you also get a cardboard box the size of Albania. Why is this? Is it so that you can take the whole thing along to real football matches and use it as a rattle? I shouldn't think so. Is it so that you don't lose it in the piles of rubbish on the floor of your bedroom and then accidentally stand on it? Probably not. No, it's more likely something to do with that the software 'industry' calls 'perceived value'. Apparently, they think that if you see a huge great box on the shelf at WH Smith's instead of a poxy little cassette case, you'll automatically go 'Coo! That game's in a really big cardboard box, so it must be at least four times as good as one that comes in a box a quarter of the size! I'm going to buy that at once, and what's more it's such a great-looking package that I'll quite happily pay much more than the usual price for it. Hurrah!' This is, of course, extremely stupid. As we all know, what you really think is 'Coo! That game's in a really big cardboard box, so it'll never fit in my tape racks, and it's so big that when I put it on the floor I won't possibly be able to avoid stamping on it and rendering it completely crumpled, tatty and crap-looking. I'll be avoiding that one like the plague until it comes out as a budget re-release in a nice sensible compact cassette case in six months' tims, that's for sure.' Software houses, eh?

Football Manager 3 - is it really 'the final word in soccer management simulations'? No, the final word in soccer management simulations is 'simulations'.

THE FOOTBALL MANAGER SAGA - AN EXHAUSTIVE HISTORICAL ESSAY The first Football Manager game is a bit of a legend in Speccy (indeed, computers in general) gaming history. Released in 1983, from roots on the ZX81, it boasted lots of complicated footy strategy stuff (injuries, transfers, and, er, not much else, really), but more importantly '3D animated match highlights!' While these consisted of static line-drawn screens of the goalmouth with tiny character-square players lurching around in leaps of about 10 feet at a time and stretched the definition of '3D' to its very limits, they were still a complete revolution, as well as being fantastically entertaining. Largely as a result of this, the game, written by a middle-aged giant of a man with a very suspect beard called Kevin Toms (the man, that is, not the beard), was a massive success. It sold well over 100,000 copies (an absolutely staggering figure - for comparison, a top-selling Speccy title these days will shift about, ooh, 1500 if it's lucky), and inspired a million (approximately) imitators. These were all totally crap, because they missed the point utterly and concentrated on filling the game with thousands and thousands of statistics and number-juggling and dispensed with the match graphics sequence completely. How stupid can you get. eh? All that tedious traipsing around a million menu screens, hanging around for hours while the program (invariably written in BASIC) decided what it wanted to do. and then no reward at the end of it all other than a black screen announcing 'Hartlepool 1 Walsall 0'. Whoopee. Anyway, dozens of crap clones later, the man the universe had come to know as 'Uncle Kevin' decided that enough was enough, and set about writing a proper sequel. Football Manager 2 added all sorts of clever extra stuff with tactics and formations and substitutions and training and so on, as well as a vastly-prettier match highlights section which actually showed you (ulp!) the entire game! Unfortunately, in a particularly action-packed match, watching the whole game could take anything up to ten minutes, which meant that playing through a whole season could call for a nine-hour session. Still, apart from that, Football Manager 2 was a bit of a corker, striking just about the best balance to date between trainspotter technical accuracy and strategic depth, and the zingier, prettier, action side of things. More crap copies followed, all of which were unbearably dull, with the possible exception of Tracksuit Manager, which Jon likes. Around the time of the last World Cup, Addictive produced a Football Manager - World Cup Edition, which was a completely new game featuring a revolutionary manager's pep-talk session, where you could shout at your players after a heavy beating, or lavish praise on them after an impressive win, in an attempt to goad them into action/pump up their morale. It was cute, but novelty-value only, really, and nothing very much came of it. And now, of course, we've got Football Manager 3. Um...

The YS top six football managers with bits of their names replaced with other words completely at random. Alex 'Fishy' Ferguson Tommy 'The Lizard' Docherty Brian 'Brian' Clough Graham 'Turnip' Taylor Andy 'Pandy' Roxburgh Ally McLeoAAARRRRGGGHHHH!

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