Producer: Gremlin Graphics
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: The Gremlin Team

This football strategy/simulation began life as a design for a traditional boardgame offered to GREMLIN some while ago. Now it appears as a computer-only entertainment. You are sweet seventeen and want to be a top footballer. At the start of your career you have £5,000 in cash, 10 'goal cards' and a pair of reasonably talented feet. Your ultimate aim is to become Footballer Of The Year and attend the prestigious award ceremony.

The first decision you make is which Division to play in - there are five skill levels available, represented by the four English Divisions and an international Super League. Goal cards are more expensive in the higher Divisions, and as they are traded for shots at goal, the number of goal cards you can afford has a bearing on your performance as a player.

The game is icon-driven from the main control menu. Accessing the globe icon reveals the performance of the team that is paying your wages - the number of goals scored, the team's morale and progress in the various competitions are revealed. The footballer icon leads to the report on the player's personal achievements: status points, the league played in and weekly earnings are shown on bar charts. A general rating is also given which summarises the footballer's overall skill level. An icon in the form of a scroll enables the player to attempt to gain a transfer, but it costs money to attract the attention of a scout - and a transfer request isn't always successful. Prices range from just £2.000 to £10,000 a go. A question mark icon conceals 'Incident Cards', which cost £200 a time and operate rather like 'Chance'cards in a game of Monopoly - money can be won or lost, transfers obtained and extra goal cards collected by buying a bit of luck (which isn't always good).

If things are going very badly, and the proverbial parrot looks so unwell that recovery is unlikely, the game can be abandoned by selecting the 'injured player' icon. There's also the facility to save a game to tape, via the tape icon, if building a career looks likely to span several long sessions.

The icon in the centre of the control screen - a football boot - leads to the football pitch. Selecting it reveals the player's financial reserves and offers the chance to buy further Goal Cards. The computer chooses the match to be played, and decides the number of shots at goal which the star will get if a Goal Card is cashed in - one, two or three shots are allowed and part of the strategy of the game lies in using the available Goal Cards to best effect.

A mini arcade sequence follows in which the player gets to shoot at the goalmouth after positioning the ball. Sometimes a couple of defenders romp towards the ball, and if a shot isn't taken before they tackle the opportunity is lost. The goalie does his best to save each shot, and once the attempts at goal are over the match ends and a teleprinter types up the result before control returns to the main icon screen.

From time to time, random events (taken from the selection of incident cards) affect the player's career. As the would-be footballing star improves his skills and earns more money, the financial impact of injuries and other misfortunes is increased - but appearance fees and racecourse winnings increase too.

Early in the game, the player has to choose an international side to play for, and once skill levels have been built up the star footballer is called upon to represent the chosen country in international friendlies - all useful goal-scoring opportunities that might influence the judges at the end of the year!

When the season ends, a report on progress is prepared and teams may be promoted or relegated. Talented players may find a transfer deal... Finally, the shortlist of candidates for the ultimate accolade is presented and the judges sit in decision. Could you become Footballer Of The Year?

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q left, W right, P up, L down, SPACE fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Use of colour: colourful icons, little elsewhere
Graphics: nothing special
Sound: mediocre
Skill levels: five
Screens: seven

This isn't a bad little game at all. Okay, so perhaps it won't appeal to your out-and-out arcade freak, but I certainly isn't dull. Graphically there is nothing here that is eyebrow-raising, but all in all it's quite neat. Icons, charts and the like are all well drawn, and the arcade sequence is adequate. The sound is dull - a tunette at the start and a few minimal effects are all you get. I don't see myself playing this forever, but it'll certainly keep me amused for a couple of lunchtimes.
BEN

What a strange game GREMLIN have come up with here. I can't say that I've seen anything quite like it before, although it's similar to Football Manager - without requiring the same thought (if you see what I mean). It is easy to see past the smart exterior of Footballer Of The Year - it's really just a lot of cute little sections, none of which are amazingly good or dominant My favourite section is when you get the chance to shoot at goal - but I soon found even this a little too easy. This is a nice idea but whether you'll find yourself playing it again and again is a different matter - I found it started to get tedious after a while.
PAUL

This game has some nice screens with colour used well, especially on the menu. The football sequence is not very good - the goalie has not been animated very well and the defenders move in very bad diagonals. The arcade section doesn't require a lot of skill. There's a large element of chance as well as strategy, and skill is needed when it comes to juggling with all the variables and coping with financial decisions. The presentation falls down a bit: screen messages sometimes flash up too quickly to read and the computer bleeps at odd times. Maybe this game will only appeal to the real football fanatic.
MIKE

OLDIES UNLIMITED

This month see the inimitable PHIL KING scouring through the CRASH back issues for that crucial information on all the rereleases between now and mid-November. Take it away Phil...

Footballer Of The Year
Producer: Kixx
Price: £2.99
Original Rating: 68%

This old Gremlin sports simulation was originally conceived as a board game, but eventually appeared on computer back in February 1987.

The game has you as a budding Gary Linker on the road to stardom. You have £5000 and ten goal cards which, as if you didn't know, are exchanged for shots at goal. An icon-driven control menu is used to access the various parts of the game - including many statistics. And if you think that you're too good for your current team (highly unlikely) a transfer can be requested.

The game's board origins aren't surprising when you see that as well as goal cards, incident cards can also be purchased. But after making a few strategic moves it's time to get out onto the pitch to play a match. An arcade sequence involves shooting at the goal mouth while avoiding the tackles of the defenders.

Footballer Of The Year is an odd mixture of strategy and arcade skills which, unfortunately, fails due to the large amount of luck involved in making progress. Moreover success is extremely easy to attain so that any minimal appeal is soon lost.

Gremlin
£7.95

It's extra-orrrdinary Brian! Everywhere you turn there's a new Spectrum soccer simulation (try saying that after a few Lucozades), aimed, no doubt, at the countless thousands who shelled out for Kevin Toms' golden oldie Football Manager.

And gameplay in Footballer Of The Year isn't a millon miles from that old chestnut. You still play for a team struggling to escape the lower divisions, only this time you deal in goal cards, which enable you to have a potshot or two at goal whenever you play them. You can also buy Incident Cards (just like Chance and Community cards in Monopoly). As you score more goals and rise up the divisions you find yourself gaining status points and being transferred, often against your will. But there's a definite way to play it to win!

This involves buying as many goal cards as you can, using them sparingly and spending the rest of your ackers on Incident Cards. From then on in, there are only seven or eight hours of hard play before you finally make Footballer Of The Year. The gameplay's not too bad if you like that sort of thing and the graphics really are excellent. Parts of the game, though, are a mite dodgy. Theres no consistency about league positions - if a team's won ten games and lost 24, you wouldn't really expect it to be sixth in the league. Not only that, there's no difference in cup games between 1st and 4th Division teams and when the Footballer Of The Year ceremony comes up someone is invariably nominated twice, and still doesn't win.

So does Footballer Of The Year hit the crossbar or is it a winner? Well, Brian, without wishing to put the boot in, let alone brandish the red card, I'm afraid it's not at the top of Division One. Still, it's a game of two halves, Brian, and you could do a hell of a lot worse in 90 minutes.

There's enough soccer action on this page to keep John Motson in cliches for a month.

Whether you end up over lunar objects or as unwell as an exotic species of avian depends on which game you support this new year.

There's something for goalkeepers, award-hungry strikers or those old fashioned play-anywhere utility players.

But even if you love footie, remember, the spectre of World Cup Carnival still haunts the terraces.

FOOTBALLER OF THE YEAR
Label: Gremlin
Author: Including Greg Holmes and Christian Shrigley
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Terry Pratt

The British-born goal ace topping the Superleague's scoring charts has walked out on Juventus.

Terry Pratt (affectionately dubbed El Tel by unimaginative Italian soccer fans) has quit soccer, blaming the boredom of playing Gremlin's latest, Footballer of the Year.

It's, sort of, Football Manager only from the footballer's point of view (rather than the managers, as with Addictive's long-time best seller).

The snag is Footballer of the Year is sadly a minor-league game, lacking originality, playing skill and (most importantly) realism.

There's not even enough to the game to even let it succeed as an automatic soccer result and statistics generator.

Quickly then, you become a footballer with a team in one of five divisions.

Choose a division, team and nationality and the game is in motion. You are told of forthcoming fixtures and choose which to play your goal-cards in - only it really makes little difference.

Goal-cards have a value of one to three and represent scoring opportunities - penalties or shots - for your player. The computer then lets you play through those opportunities on a pitch with a goal.

Most of the time it's pretty well a two-in-three chance you'll score.

No skill, OK but how did your rivals get on? Are you topping the score charts in your division? What did the local press make of your debut?

There's no way of knowing.

So... do you want to buy more goal cards? No. Do you want to play a goal card in the next game? Yes... and round again.

And how about El Tel's career? He joined Peterborough on a paltry £75 a week, scored 29 goals to help them to the top of Division IV and was transferred to Swansea (very much against his wishes).

Still, a hatfull of goals for Swansea in the last five games of the season took them from 17th in the table to the championship - no mean feat.

Bored with life in Division III, El Tel started again playing for Juventus in the Super League. Thirty goals in 25 games meant there would probably have been no room for Ian Rush next season but, although Juventus were top of the table, our hero was still on £75 a week, still rated 'average' and only making ends meet through a succession of gambling triumphs outside of soccer.

MACHINE: Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Atari, C16 +4, BBC, Electron
SUPPLIER: Gremlin
PRICE: £7.95 (Spectrum/MSX), £9.95 (C64/Amstrad/Electron/BBC/Atari), £6.95 (C16 +4), £14.95 (all discs)
VERSION TESTED: Spectrum

"Yeah, Brian. I was sick as a parrot and over the moon at the same time. I'd been playing for Spurs in Div. One for a few games when I was transfered to Wigan Athletic. OK, I hadn't scored many goals and I had a few words with the ref in our last cup match... but Wigan? Then I realised that my share of the transfer fee would help me buy that Porsche I'd always wanted and I'd be a proper superstar in a team like Wigan!"

Such is the stuff of Gremlin's Footballer of the Year, the latest in a long line of games based on our national winter sport. Will it challenge Addictive's Football Manager for the computer cup?

Well, now we've seen it, FOTY doesn't really set out to compete with the above mentioned classic. It's a whole different ball game - if you'll pardon the pun.

You don't play to help your team in this game. Your only aim is to claim the Footballer of the Year title, earning as much cash and getting a good reputation as your career progresses.

You start the game aged 17 with £5,000 and the whole world at your Adidas clad feet. You find yourself in a fourth division team - you can pick which one - and with a burning ambition to make it into division one.

The game is icon driven from a menu screen. You access the different parts of the game via an arrow cursor and the fire button. Here's a run down of the symbols and what they do.

The Globe shows you the state of affairs of your team, their position in the league table, their morale and the usual WDL-points table. The numbers show how many games your team has played - but if you go through more than one season in a session the numbers keep on adding up. They don't reset to the start of a new season. The number of goals you've scored and in which sort of game - cup, league etc - are also shown in another table.

The other teams in the league aren't indicated - so you could be top of the league but you don't know who is chasing you and how many points behind they are. This is a disappointing feature of the game and takes some of the interest away from the actual matches you get to play. But I suppose it comes back to the individual being more important than the team in this game.

The Footballer's Head icon gets you into a status screen which shows your skill rating, your earnings and the league you currently play in. Status points go up and down as you play.

The Scroll allows you to purchase transfer cards - once you've earned enough cash. Buy a card and you could be spotted by a scout from a bigger and better team. A successful transfer will bring more money and more status.

The Question Mark is a sort of Monopoly style "chance" section. Here you can buy an incident card for £200 a shot. This can lead to many things, a win at the Casino, a transfer, free goal cards, and disasters like injuries, burglaries and fines.

Sometimes nothing happens at all!

The Football Boot icon gets you into the game proper. There's an arcade section which allows you to control shots at goal - either proper goalmouth incidents or penalty shots.

You get the chance to have a shot at goal by purchasing goal cards. You begin with ten and can buy more as you go. The cost varies depending on what league you're in. If you run out you could try to get free ones by purchasing an incident card.

But there's no indication if the goals you score help your team to win or not.

The arcade section is fun. You have to set up your shots quickly if you're being chased by defenders. But a penalty allows you to take your time and beat the keeper. Graphics in this section are pretty good.

After the game comes the Grandstand style teletyper which prints out reports of the matches you've played to suitable tickertape sound effects. You can speed up the printer by holding down a key - a good idea this as it speeds up the game.

You often get a chance to play for the international squad - but I was never good enough to have a crack at an international. I did get into trouble with the ref a few times, was injured and scored some beautiful goals - but I still didn't manage to win the ultimate accolade despite being promoted to the first division after a couple of seasons. You can jump right in at the top and try division one.

Be careful how you use your goal cards. They are worth a set number of goal chances per match. Use them wisely and you'll be able to enjoy the arcade section throughout the season.

There seemed to be a couple of bugs in the version I played. I seemed to be playing Oldham many more times than possible in a proper season and the teletype machine developed terminal spelling difficulties after a couple of seasons. And since when has Roma been in Div One?

Footballer of the Year won't replace Football Manager - but it adds a new dimension to computer soccer simulations. Despite its limitations it's fun to play and will appeal to all would-be soccer superstars everywhere.