'Ere we go again...

Producer: Gremlin
Goals Scored: £7.99 cass, £12.99 disk
Author: Gaz (code), Jon (graphics), Benn (sound)

'Ere we go, 'ere we go, er ... I can't remember the rest of the lyrics! And Lineker has scored - a nice looking bird she is too! However, Gary gets most of his kicks on the football pitch, wearing an England jersey and occasionally hitting the back of the net (if someone pushes him in!).

But on with the game... Gary Lineker's Hotshot allows you to control any of 16 national sides. However, this isn't the World Cup - the teams are in a league of four divisions. Two players may also play a 'friendly', while other options allow game time and computer team intelligence to be altered.

Matches are shown from directly overhead, the huge pitch scrolling to follow the ball. As in most booty sims, you control the nearest player to the ball. If none of your players are on-screen, an arrow shows the direction of the nearest one. Once in possession, dribbling is automatic, although going backwards without first rotating leaves the ball behind.

Various types of kick (including overhead) can be performed by moving the joystick as fire is pressed (shot power is determined by how long the fire button is held down). Pressing fire when not in possession makes the player do a sliding tackle. But if the timing isn't quite right, you can easily foul an opposing player, resulting in a free kick (even inside the penalty area!). Persistent fouling results in a player being sent off.

Throw-ins, corners and goal kicks are handled identically to normal kicks. Goal keepers are totally automatic, tracking the ball and kicking it upfield when they've caught it. But they're no Peter Shiltons - they can't even jump up or dive.

Match graphics are surprisingly colourful, although as a result, the scrolling of the pitch is jerky. But generally, presentation is good, especially on the title screen where a wide range of options can be selected while listening to a lively 128K tune.

The bad news is that despite its fine appearance, Gary Lineker's Hotshot loses out in the playability stakes. The pitch is far too large, making passing very difficult - the only way of knowing the positions of off-screen players is by watching a tiny 'radar'screen! But probably the biggest flaw is the way the game time continues even when the ball is dead. This means that the side in the lead can just waste oodles of time - this may be realistic, but it's still irritating.

Another problem is that the computer teams aren't very intelligent, and are therefore easy to beat. However, as in most sports simulations, the two player mode gives the greatest enjoyment. Gary Lineker's Hotshot is fun for a while, although ultimately second division stuff.

PHIL [62%]

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: surprisingly colourful, although the scrolling's jerky
Sound: catchy 128K title tune, decent effects
Options: one or two players. Choose from sixteen teams

I can't say that I have been overly impressed with Gremlin products of late, but this does go a small way to redressing the balance. Graphically the game is good with a bird's-eye view of the little players thundering around the pitch, fouling each other like crazy. This is one thing which did annoy me a bit: you only get a lousy free kick after being fouled - Vinnie Jones would have a field day! Still, despite a few flaws, Gary Lineker's Hotshot is worthy of consideration.
MARK [66%]

Gremlin
£7.99 cass/£12.99 disk
Reviewer: David Wilson

Quick! Pinch me, I must be dreaming! is this a footie game I see before me? How has it escaped the clutches of Dr Marcus? Maybe he was too busy chatting with his pal Simon Bates. Anyway, here we go, here we go, here we go.

Hot Shot is a footie simulation, played from an overhead viewpoint. You take the role of an international side and can choose your team from the humble Englan, Wales, Scotland or Ireland (Republic or Northern) right through to the mighty Brazil or Argentina! The teams are organised (confusingly) from the First through to the Fourth Division, and you must attempt to steer your team to the top of the league. The players can perform sliding tackles and headers, but be careful if your are prone to a bit of foul play, 'cos there at the bottom of the screen is the ref complete with his card collection. (And I'm not talking about PG Tips picture cards!)

Hot Shot gives you the option of changing the length of the game between 10, 30, 60 or 90 minutes. The middle two seem the best. This is because the computer usually gets at least one goal in, and thus the shorter the game length you choose, the less time you get to equalise, let alone win!

The gameplay is very much like Match Day II, with you controlling whichever player is nearest the ball. This causes the usual problems, like when you have two players at an equal distance from the ball, nine times out of ten you end up moving the wrong one in completely the wrong direction. But you can dribble (Ugh! You messy readers! Ed) and boot the ball in different directions with different amounts of power. And fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how confident you feel, your goalkeeper is computer controlled and moves automatically, (a trifle too slowly for my liking,) to whichever side of the goal is under threat.

The dilemma that must face programmers of these games is in the area of game scale. If you opt for nice big player sprites, then you are only able to show a small area of the pitch at a time. On the other hand, if you choose to show as much of the pitch as poss, then this is at the expense of the players who will be teeny weeny dots! Hot Shot of course opts for the large(ish) sprites. This means that although the sliding, tackling, and heading, is quite nice, when it actually comes to shooting at goal from any distance over about ten feet, or even passing up the field to any of your team mates, then a large amount of guesswork takes over. To its credit, Gremlin has tried to overcome this by showing a display of the pitch in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. This shows the whereabouts of the ball, but apart from this does little to alleviate the luck element.

Gazza Lineker's Hot Shot is a straight arcade football game in the style of Match Day II. Its sprites aren't as big, but it's a faster, smoother game than Match Day. If you're a footie sime fanatic, or in the market for your first arcade football game, then you'll probably find Hot Shot a fun game if you already possess most of the other football games on the market then you won't find much new in this one. Mind you, if you do have most of the other football games on the market then you're no doubt soccer loopy and I'm probably wsting my breath!

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Torch? Check. Helmet? Check. Ability to write incredibly informative and witty reviews? Check. (Sort of.) Say hello to RICH PELLEY & JON PILLAR.

Kix
£3.99
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

This is actually the middle game in the series featuring "the man with possibly the nicest legs in football" (as I once overheard two women debating on the bus), the other two comprising of Superskills (a boring old waggler) and Superstar Soccer (a flip-screen soccer jobby) which was, well, just try spelling 'park' backwards.

Hot Shot!, however is a far more modern overhead-view 'control one player at a time and another player can join in with the fun if he wants as well' affair, which, despite its moniker, has nothing a do with Gary at all. It strives to be extremely realistic by sticking as closely as possible to 'the book' (the one with all the rules in it, that is), so fouls, bookings and free-kicks are all here, along with lots of moves including sliding tackles, flicks and overhead kicks. In fact the only thing the game doesn't try to do is to be any good. Well, it probably does try but it just lacks that certain something which makes a football game work well. One problem is that it's not surprising to find the screen completely void of any players at all - let alone a member of your team. And then when you do get the ball, actually successfully dribbling or kicking it without giving it to the other side is all far too tricky to make the game playable. It's not too bad, but when you take a brief look at the other 9,723 billion football games on offer, a vast quantity of which are also available on re-release, then I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

Gremlin hit the crossbar.

Just when you thought the glut of soccer games was over, along comes another Gary Lineker-endorsed product to prove everybody wrong. Taking a more mainstream approach than many of the same genre, GL's Hot Shots provides a one or two player game of eleven-a-side soccer.

The pitch and team members are viewed from overhead and control is apportioned in the usual way, with the player nearest the ball coming under direct control. Pressing the fire button causes the player to kick the ball when in possession, and attempt a sliding tackle when not. Fouls are taken into consideration, so too much Vinny Jones off-the-ball defence is frowned upon.

Ball-control also follows the now-standard procedure: while the fire button is held down, a sliding meter varies the strength of shot, and pointing the joystick changes the direction of shot accordingly. In this way, banana shots and overhead back-kicks can be executed. Surprisingly, the player becomes stationary when the joystick is pressed, allowing the opposition to catch up and attempt a tackle.

The package supports a wide range of options, including a choice of pitch surface and colour, team colours and game length.

Reviewer: Steve Jarratt

RELEASE BOX
Atari ST, £19.99dk, Imminent

Amiga, £19.99dk, Imminent
Spec, 128 £7.99cs, £12.99dk, Out Now
Amstrad, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Imminent
C64/128, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Out Now
IBM PC, No version planned

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 60/100
1 hour: 55/100
1 day: 52/100
1 week: 50/100
1 month: 25/100
1 year: 0/100

Gremlin Graphics
Spec £7.99 cass, C64/Ams £9.99 cass, Spec £12.99 disk, C64/Ams £14.99 disk

Goz iineker turns up again in a Gremlin product, surprise, surprise, this time in "the most realistic football game ever produced for your computer". Hem hem. I'll be the judge of that. To my way of thinking you can't turn over too much control to the human player in a computer soccer match, as the player won't be able to control the team and just lose all the time, which is very distressing. The way it OUGHT to be done is like Ocean's Match Day II by Jon Ritman, which was to give the team a certain amount of artificial intelligence, and let them help the human player to know what's going on.

Okay so the sample we reviewed was on the Spectrum, so the fact that the game slows down every time anything moves is to be expected. But even bearing that in mind, I found the game tiresome and fiddly. Playing on the keyboard was impossible, some mix up with the move and quit keys, and so I had to reboot the game and use a Kempston joystick. You can have two players (one keys/one stick) playing at once, which is nice but it's a bit of a tight squeeze.

You can initially select controls and inspect the standings of the league. Although it's not explained as such, it seems to be the World Cup, as all the other teams in the league ore Brazil, Poland, Germany, etc, rather than domestic clubs. The games are then played, and the league standings judged to find the league winner.

The game is seen from above in plan view, so the player sprites are just little heads with legs poking out of the top and bottom. Each player has a little dot next to him when he is under the control of your joystick/keys. One of the good features of the game is that the goalies are automatic and track the ball, attempting a save when they detect a shot coming in. The ball grows bigger when it's kicked to give a sense of depth to the view. The controls are sluggish and the computer runs rings around your team. The odds are better against a human player, but again the speed of the game lets it down. It's hard to pin down what's duff about GL's Hot Shot!, but it lacks something special, that little extra oomph that separates the good from the so-so.

If you enjoy getting posted at football GI's Hot Shot! is the one for you. (You little masochist, you!). Really, nothing special.