Soccer Q

Your Sinclair

Overall 8/10

Marcus Berkmann 8/10

BARGAIN BASEMENT They're certainly cheap, but are they cheerful? Marcus Berkmann rootles around in the YS Lucky Dip... SOCCER Q Cult Games £1.99 Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann From the people who brought you Footie Director, here's a brilliant little variation. Instead of using your management skill and all that rubbish to guide you through the divisions and along the cup trail, here you answer trivia questions on football. The result - a cross between pub trivia games and the best footie sim yet seen on the Spec - is hugely enjoyable, even if it is about as slow as FD and, like other recent games from that stable, presented in a typeface that's almost impossible to read. But if you're a trivia nut, and worse still, a football nut, and even worse a football sim nut - and I'm all three - you'll lap this up for breakfast. Each of the four divisions has just eight teams, making seasons rather shorter than in old FD, and you have ratings out of 100 for goalkeeper, defence, midfield and attack. These you can bump up with training - you answer a multiple choice question, and the rating goes up if you get it right, or down if you get it wrong. You can play the game, and answer a question every time the opposition attacks your goal and every time you attack theirs. Simple, huh? And completely brilliant. Light relief at a reasonable price for FD fans everywhere.

Crash

Overall 35%

£2.99 Cult Soccer Q is a rather strange mixture of football management game and trivia quiz. The first task is to choose one of the thirty two teams on offer. The aim as in all other footy games is to reach the top of division one and ultimately win the FA Cup. But goals aren't scored by playing matches, they are in fact awarded when you answer a soccer related question correctly. At the end of each match the league tables are calculated and displayed, but watch out if your performance is consistently low you will be relegated rather than promoted. Training your team is very important the success of this is again determined by a correct answer to a question, get it wrong and the team will be too tired to train. Garish colours, long winded print-outs of the days results and footy related questions that I could neither read (because of the garish backgrounds) or answer anyway (because I'm not as footy mad as our Phil) did nothing to endear me to Soccer Q. Not that most football manager games are wildly exciting anyway, but the idea of asking trivia questions instead of viewing porky sprites wobbling around a pitch isn't a bad one I suppose.

ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)

Ace Rating 593/1000

Cult - Spec, C64, Amstrad: £2.99 Here's a new twist in soccer management games, entirely based on quiz questions, with four cut-down divisions of eight teams each, and both FA and League cup competitions. There's no messing around picking the team, but training can improve what's there to start with. The quiz questions all take the same form: a multiple-choice selection of four answers, one of which has to be picked before a time limit runs out. In the training rounds a correct answer improves the team's rating and a wrong one reduces it. During matches, the questions determine whether a goal is scored or not. If the opposition are attacking and you answer correctly it's a save. If your team is attacking, a correct answer will score a goal. A base of 2,000 questions should keep the game fresh and interesting for a while, but there is little else to draw you back after they have been exhausted.