Review by Raphie on 14 Oct 2012 (Rating: 4)
I have played a lot of soccer management games on the ZX Spectrum and this one is my favourite. I was addicted to this back in the day.
The charm of signing highly skilled players on your team to improve your squad's ratings, the transfer market worked like an auction which at the time really appealed to me, this is probably the only game in history where Gary Lineker can agree a transfer to Peterborough United in Division 4.
It was also great fun in that results really benefitted your progress as a manager, you start at Division 4 and after seven straight victories you may be offered a job with a Division 3 team with more money and (hopefully) a better squad, do you continue your fine progress with your current team or do you sacrifice that to take a Division 3 job to find they are bottom with only 2 defenders...decisions decisions.
And that's what I loved about this game. For me it's the best management game on the Spectrum, of course there's Football Manager which is superb as well but this for me is boss.
By the time Multi Player Soccer Manager came out, Football Manager was 8 years old and the spectrum was innundated with management games.
In order to stand out from the crowd any new game had to be something special. Unfortunately MPSM has nothing new to offer. In fact it has very little to offer full stop. MPSM seems to have been designed to be as uninteresting as possible. Take the match screen for example. Rather than trying to create any kind of excitement with graphical highlights or match commentary all you get is a static screen showing the result of your match. Thrilling eh?
The game can be played with up to 7 other human players but when the game is a dull as this, why would you bother?
Review by YOR on 04 Apr 2020 (Rating: 3)
Another football manager game that thinks multiple players playing the game is a good idea, so much it has to tell you by its name doesn't it, which come to think of it makes this give out an instant red flag of having potentially the worst name of any football manager game. This time up to four players can play this, which is only 50% of what Advanced Soccer Simulator offered but still mind-bogling to think a football manager game can be played with more than one player. This may seem similar to most football manager games, and it is, but there are notable exceptions.
In what is the usual norm of these kind of games, you start at the bottom division with a team randomly selected for you, in my case Peterborough United, and have to work your way to the top division via promotion or via job offers to a higher division team if you perform well, in my case I got an offer from Grimsby Town 10th in Division 3, yes please! Usually, you choose a team and you're stuck with them throughout the game until you're sacked and the game ends, here you can move onto a better team if you do well, or if you're not careful you'll join a more rubbish team sitting third from bottom of Division 3 with a goalkeeper that has a 1.8 rating and two strikers with a 4.8 rating combined. Another notable difference is it has zero sound, not that I was expecting much in the sound department but I was expecting the odd beep and blop while going through the menus and results screens, but this has nothing.
There is also almost no waiting time whatsoever which is pretty rare in a football manager game and I like that alot. There's no highlights or match screen as well and instead it just takes you directly to the results screen, which kind of takes the joys of these games away, not that there's much anyway, but you do expcet to see something like this and here you don't. The menu screen has icons that you need to highlight rather than press a number, which again is different, and each one also loads quickly and doesn't have you waiting so long. Hardly anything seems drawn out, and I like that a lot, and it's probably one reason I spent more time at this than I probably should have and I only stopped because my game crashed which was annoying and a lesson to save constantly if I'm playing this again.
It seems to be a cleverly written game with a fair amount of effort and detail put into this and I can definitely see the appeal in this game, from its average score on WOS, the amount of votes it received, Raphie's review and there's even an updated MOD available for download which contains European teams. Clearly MPSM was popular, possibly the most popular football manger game Cult released, and I have to admit I did enjoy this for what it was. It's still not going to set the world alight, it's still not going to grasp much interest and it's still not particularly exciting, but for what it is it holds up as fairly decent and quite enjoyable. It's no Football Manager but it's certainly a better option than a lot of games of the same nature.
