I was determined to review something else other than another football management game, but then I saw this lurking around the World of Spectrum archive and couldn't help but give it a look, primarily because it looks very similar to Code Masters' 1st Division Manager, but more on that later.
First off I clear up the mystery surrounding Jimmy himself, who is this Jimmy person? World of Spectrum lists this game as an inspiration to Jimmy Greaves, which is incorrect. The Jimmy is Jim Scott who ran Beyond Belief, the publishers of the game....you silly silly people it's no wonder WoS was left abandoned swimming with the sharks eh?
Ahem, anyway now on to the game, it begins with a choice of 28 teams from across Europe to manage. It includes teams from England, Scotland, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, as well as one team from Belgium and one from what was then Yugoslavia, which is now Serbia. Each are numbered and you have to select the number of the team you wish to manage, so for this review I went to number 17 and selected Lazio. It contains a glitch in the code where you can increase the number to double digits and then when you reduce the number it remains on double digits even when you go down to 9, so that it reads 90, 80, etc, but there is no club 80 so you would therefore manage club 8. You start at Division 2 and the top two teams are promoted to Division 1.
Then a period of waiting takes place which made me think the game had crashed, there was no notice of waiting, it just froze, that was until we reach, of all things, a desk, a desk looking very similar to the one on 1st Division Manager. There's the computer, the phone, the file drawer and the newspaper, but no radio, well there's no music, all we get is beeping when you move the arrow, so that'll explain why there's no radio, but everything else is there, including the door, and they aren't are well drawn as in 1st Division Manager, obviously.
On the computer you can either look at the division table or a scout report, this compares you to your opponents in defence, midfield, attack and position. My opponents, Bayern Munich, or Munchen, whichever you prefer, have stats of 10, 11 and 12, while my stats are all minus 3, clearly I don't stand a chance. That's because I haven't picked a team yet and we do this via the file drawer.
This is very different to 1st Division Manager, as here we have a complete profile of a player, including their portrait, name, age, position, salary, morale, value and ratings which determine skill, stamina, speed, aggression, and overall ability, as well as their appearances and goals count. When you select a player his morale improves, and if they don't play it worsens their morale. Their overall ability, or abilty it actually reads, increases also if they are selected. Among my squad includes a defender called Dave, a midfielder called A. Mole and a forward called J. Scott, this is the Jimmy of Jimmy's Super League of course. Interestingly there is no goalkeeper in this game so I presume the first defender you selected plays in goal. Now that I've selected my team my stats read 10 for defence and midfield and 6 for attack. You can also transfer list a player here as well.
The phone allows you to phone the bank manager like in 1st Division Manager and here you can ask for a loan. You also negotiate transfers here, like 1st Division Manager, but the negotiation process is very different. Unlike 1st Division Manager which had you enter a surname of the player you wish to buy, here you are given a player, in this case G. Palister, a defender from Liverpool, we can phone the player but he's costing too much money, so we will go to next player instead. Now we have midfielder D. Saunders also from Liverpool who costs even more money. So now we've I. Rush, a forward from Montpellier who is expensive as well. When you do phone the player you don't actually get to talk to the player but rather the team's manager, here you make an offer and hope he'll accept it, but I don't have enough money so of course he declined. Interestingly the bank manager and the manager of the player you wish to buy is the same person, or at least they have the same portrait. Oh and remember the newspaper? You can't access it so we'll just have to leave that one behind.
So onto the match then, as the menu desk is similar to 1st Division Manager you would think the in-game screen is the same as well, of course we're wrong as it's a different programmer. So in its place is the score and the time on the bottom, commentary on the middle, a highlights screen at top of the screen accompanied by a commentator who is pretty badly drawn, but still this is a nice touch and quite unique for these type of games. The commentary is quite nice but easily repetitive, there are many times he will commend good passing by the team. When some action happens, like a shot, we have a badly drawn shooter and a badly drawn goalie who look badly outdated. Here the player shoots the ball at the goalie and even when it looks like the ball goes past the goalie he saves it anyway. Or it can go past him for a goal, which didn't happen because it was a 0-0 draw, and we didn't even have a shot. So after this we see the other division scores via Jim Results Service, followed by your match attendance and an update of your finances. Then we're back at the desk before it freezes again which again makes you wonder if the game will even boot back up, eventually it does but this really isn't clever as there isn't even a notice about waiting, but the reason for the waiting is some occassions your physio rings you to inform you of an injury to one of your players, and he looks the same as the bank manager. Also, one for your players can declare that he is not happy and request a transfer, you either agree or refuse.
So how do I summerise Jimmy's Super League? Well it works better than most BASIC football management games but the fact is the menu desk is a direct carbon copy of 1st Division Manager so that loses marks. Also the match screen at times doesn't provide much excitement, there was one match I had that had no action at all, just commentary about possession, tackles and interceptions but no shots, which is very boring, just as boring as watching the clock tick by justing waiting for your score to update. The game does has some periods of waiting and without warning, nowadays we have emulators which allows us to speed up the game, but back then when we were playing these games on a real Spectrum you didn't have that, so it would appear your game has stopped running because it hasn't told you to wait. Plus injuries mount up quite frequently which leaves you short of a squad before you know it, and players on the transfer market most of the time are pretty expensive. In this case the game continues and you play reserves, which almost certainly means defeat, and a heavy one at that.
So simply Jimmy's Super League is not a highlight in the football management genre, it steals graphics from another game, it has a largely uneventful match screen with badly drawn outdated players and is clustered with injuries to your players. There's other management games that were released much earlier which look and play better compared to this.
