The Soccer Squad

Sinclair User

Graphics 68%

Sound 58%

Playability 68%

Lastability 89%

Overall 77%

Chris Jenkins 77%

Label: Gremlin Author: Various Price: £9.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Reviewer: Chris Jenkins You're really going to have to be a football fanatic to survive through this package. This is a compilation of four old Gremlin titles, Footballer of the Year, SuperStar Soccer, SuperSkills and Roy of the Rovers. Two of the are tied in with Gary Lineker, so his ugly mug stares out from the packaging of SuperSkills and SuperStar Soccer; Footballer of the Year is a sort of strategy game and Roy of the Rovers is a weird mix of adventure and simulation. The package comes on two cassettes in a library case, and the instructions are all boiled down onto one difficult-to-read sheet. Footballer of the Year is an icon-driven simulation in which you start out as a spotty 17-year-old apprentice with £5,000 in the bank, and have to make your way through the sport until you're voted Footballer of the Year. By selecting different icons you can access your team's status/player status; play a match, where an arcade sequence gives you the chance to score penalties; transfer to another team, save or load a game, and, the most interesting bit, pick a random incident Card which can be anything from a free goal to a fine for spitting. SuperSkills is a bit like Daley Thompson's Push-ups, or whatever it was called, because it's more to do with doing your exercises than with actually playing football. Lots of joystick-waggling fun as you practise pushups, ball juggling (Fner!), dribbling (on the pitch, not down your chin), and finally shooting through tyres. Not bad, but a bit futile if what you really want is a soccer game, try SuperStar Soccer, which has all the facilities of a management simulation - trading players, training, setting leagues - but which also has a nifty match simulation which can played at normal speed or up to ten times normal. Last in the list is the strange Roy of the Rovers (not that Roy himself is strange, you understand). This is an arcade-adventure in which the Manchester team are kidnapped the eve of the big match - shock horror! Using a menu system you can make Roy walk, run, pick up and drop objects, smile or fight. What he can't do, like most footballers, is walk and talk at the same time, hee hee. It's all rather clever and ends with a decent five-a-side simulation, so in many ways Roy is the best of the bunch, top of the league, big banana or whatever they call themselves these days. Odd that this collection doesn't actually feature a full-scale, no-nonsense, whack-it-in-the-back-of-the-net match simulation, but this lot should keep any soccer fan over the moon for many a season.

Your Sinclair

Life Expectancy 61%

Graphics 66%

Instant Appeal 68%

Addictiveness 63%

Overall 67%

Matt Bielby 67%

Gremlin £9.99 cass/£14.99 disk Reviewer: Matt Bielby Blimey! Where's Marcus? This is the sort of thing he should be doing. Oi! Marcus, come here!... Ahem. Dr Berkmann seems to have decided he's sick of footie games and done a runner. You'll regret this, you scamp! Ah, well, Gremlins Soccer Squad. It's done a fair number of footie games over the years, hasn't it, Spec-chums? They're not a brilliant, but at least this compilation gives us four quite different ones so there's little danger of repetition. So, let's kick off (ahem) with... ROY OF THE ROVERS Weird, this one. I'd even venture well weird. The story seems to have been cobbled up more along Viz lines than those of Roy's own strip (oo-er). Get this - the Melchester Rovers ground is due to be bulldozed and turned into a multistorey pet food emporium or somesuch, and Roy's organised a celebrity five-a-side match to save it. But yikes! Roy's team has been kidnapped and our hero has to rush around the place rescuing his buddies in time for the five o'clock kick off. In other words there are two games here, the first being a sort of adventure where you run around the streets of Melchester looking for clues as to where your team has been hidden. The computer flips the screen around 90° every time you turn a corner (so you're always walking horizontally across it), and you can pick up objects or talk to people you meet using option windows pulled from the top of the screen. The puzzles are pretty tricky though and since you've got a time limit it looks like you'll have to play the second half of the match with only one player. Lumme! As for the footie bit itself, it's a sort of inferior Match Day II, but with trickier controls and teams that are almost impossible to tell apart. Still, once you get good at the first bit and manage to find one or even two other players you might be in with a chance. Not the greatest footie sim, but it's quite fun the way the two parts hang together. Verdict: 71° FOOTBALLER OF THE YEAR Another weird twist on the soccer game. In this one you play a rookie fourth division striker, hoping to work your way up the league and through various teams to be nominated Footballer Of The Year. You have a wedge of money and must buy Goal Cards (which give you a chance to score when you play them) or Incident Cards (which give you random bonuses like Chance Cards in Monopoly) as well as play the game. Graphically quite nice, but it's a bit dodgy the way the league positions of teams bear little resemblance to the number of games they appear to have won or lost. Nicely programmed, but a bit lacking in the playability department for my money. Verdict 66° GARY LINEKER'S SUPERSKILLS A totally different ball game (ho-ho). This one's all training, comprising weights, press-ups, squat thrusts and the like. It's a multiload, so you've time to rest from the monkey bars (that really crap thing they have on army assault courses where they make you hang from a ladder upside down) before moving onto the ball skills. There's juggling, dribbling and shooting to get right, and a fair amount of joystick waggling involved to build your power up. Like Daley Thompson in Ocean's Olympic Challenge you get to cheat a bit by taking glucose tablets. And that's it really. Not all that much to do with football at all, but quite a fun gym sim all the same. Verdict 65° GARY LINEKER'S SUPERSTAR SOCCER Another of Gremlin's management-game-cum-footie-action packages, this one features a nightmarish pic of our Gazza on the loading screen. In fact, it's probably inferior to Footballer Of The Year in that, even though it's got more to it, what's there is less polished. The first half is all trading and training players as you build up a squad of ten, (possible recruits are graded in terms of age and skill) and then it's onto the match itself which actually uses only six players. It's jerkier than Match Day II, harder to control and generally less fun all round. You choose the joystick control of either the centre forward or goalie, while the computer looks after the rest of the team. Choose to control the coach as well and you can pick from a menu of attacking or defensive tactics. It's all perfectly playable, but falls between two stools, being neither a full-blown management game or an arcade game. And there we have it. Gremlin certainly like its football, but does football like it? This is quite a fun compilation for soccer fans but, to be honest, the point of the actual game seems to have eluded the programmers a bit. Most of these attempt to combine management strategy and arcade soccer in some way and aren't that brilliant either. Wouldn't you be better buying Match Day II for the action and Football Manager for the strategy and tossing the idea of combining the two down the dumper for bad ideas where it belongs? (Clue - yes you would.)