Anco
£9.95 cass, £14.95 disk
The Amiga version won an industry award and has been played by the ZZAP! guys next door for many months (and indeed still is), and now we get to welcome the Spectrum Kick Off into the CRASH office.
As with many footy games the obligatory option menus have to be flicked through: choose between one or two player game, decide whether to play with keys or joystick. Practice skills or penalties, play a single game, or if you can grab a few people off the street (preferably ones you know), you can set up a league. There are eight international teams on offer: Spain, Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Argentina and England. The league runs for 14 weeks (ie 14 games), and don't worry if you can't find seven other friends - the computer will control teams you don't have players for. Next you set the playing time, which ranges between 10 and 90 minutes. Then choose a skill level. International, National, Reserve, Youth and Sunday League are on offer - each player picks his/her own skill (there's always one clever dick who chooses International to your Sunday League). Finally choose a playing formation 4-3-3 (defensive play), 4-2-4 (attacking play), 4-4-2 (good midfield control) and 5-3-2 (sweeper defensive play). And now whether you're playing a single game or a pitch.
There are several referees - some real sticklers who pickup on every foul, others who turn a blind eye. Whichever, don't foul too often - you can't win it all your players have been sent off.
The Speccy version looks quite good and is certainly playable with great features like tough referees, penalties, corners etc, my fave being the league table: a great excuse to get your friends round and wipe the floor with 'em. While not usually a great lover of football games, I must admit Kick Off proved entertaining.
MARK [77%]
Kick Off is brilliant! If you want a good laugh that is. Tiny little blobs (I think they're supposed to be footballers) run around the pitch, half of them covered in a purple splodge that leaks onto the grass! You have to make these footballers move a small ball around the pitch by pushing it in the direction you want it to go. This is all very well until you need to change direction, because the ball never tags along with you, it just trundles on it's own course! This makes playing a decent game of football very difficult. There are plenty of options in the game though: you can choose different leagues, players and formations to play in. Kick Off is a bad attempt at simulating what was a really good game on 16-bit. The only similarity is the colour of the sticker on the tape! Steer clear of this one.
NICK [36%]
| Presentation | 56% |
|---|---|
| Graphics | 48% |
| Sound | 50% |
| Playability | 56% |
| Addictivity | 55% |
| Overall | 56% |
Anco
£9.95 cass
Reviewer: Matt Bielby
This is a really, really weird one. The 16-bit versions are classics (I think anyone would acknowledge that), but while the Speccy version isn't as good it's still a very different kettle of fish from most footie games. We didn't have any great hopes for it since Anco slipped it out ever so quietly with no real publicity or anything but in actual fact it's quite a pleasant surprise.
So, first up, the presentation - and it's lousy. The little purple and white players are pretty indistinct, there are oodles of graphical glitches and both men and ball have a bizarre tendency to go under the 25 yard line! in fact, this gives it very much the feel of a rather bad three or four year old game. Hardly what you'd call 'state of the art'.
But playability is another matter altogether! I know footie games are normally incredibly popular (even the bad ones) but, personally, I'm not much into them. They've got a strange sort of addictiveness, it's true (even if you're not much into football), but I can't get much fun out of the managerial aspects, graphically there's not much you can do with them and the controls are often hard to get to grips with. And, to cap it all, gameplay is too often stodgy and slow.
That's not a criticism you could make of Kick Off though! For a start it's fast. Very fast indeed. It's almost like ice hockey or basketball (or pinball!) with the game moving from one goal to the other in a matter of seconds. There's no way you're gong to get bored, that's for sure. It's easy to get into too. There's a trial option for you to learn ball control, how to take corners and so on, but, as the controls seem to have been kept as simple as possible you'll quickly want to get into a real game and learn 'on the job'. I did lose 2-1 (ahem), but it was only my first go. Anyway, they give you a choice of five skill levels so all players are catered for. Of course, the real test of these sorts of things is in a two player game, so how does it fare? Well, let's have a little listen, shall we?
"Blimey!". "Oi! Gerroff!". "You fouled me!" "Send him off, ref!". "Yellow card!" "Oi! You fouled me again! You're a dirtier player than Real Madrid!" (From the original soundtrack of me and Davey playing). Yep, it goes down pretty well all right, since it's so fast and frantic, though the lousy graphics do spoil things slightly.
All in all then, a different sort of footie game, a lot faster and easier to get into than usual, but with some annoying glitches and a slightly unfinished look. Still, there's no denying it's a lorra, lorra fun (especially in two player mode).
| Life Expectancy | 86% |
|---|---|
| Instant Appeal | 75% |
| Graphics | 62% |
| Addictiveness | 84% |
| Overall | 80% |
THE COMPLETE AND UTTER YS GUIDE TO SOCCER ON THE SPECCY
Footie games, eh? Where'd we be without 'em? There've been hundreds of the blooming things, with more on the way each month, and they always (always! always!) sell like hot cakes (even the ones that are crap). So with the World Cup lining itself up on the horizon, let's join the slightly less-than-enthusiastic JONATHAN DAVIES, as we lead you by the hand into the past, present and future world of the Spectrum soccer game.
Oh dear. How can I start? Um, quite a few phrases spring to mind. Like "They're all the same!" and "No, please, not another one!" and, erm, "Let me out of here!" The problem, you see, is that for every MicroProse Soccer or Matchday 2 there are six or seven World Cup Carnivals (US Gold's tragic 1986 attempt at a footie sim) to wade through. And I should know - I've just waded through them all. Quite frankly I wouldn't care if the colour green never darkened my Speccy again. I'm sick as a parrot. So let's just forget all about them, eh?
What? No. You like them? Cripes. (Better get going on this giant mega-feature thingie then, hadn't you? Ed) Er, yes. Right. Football.
Well, there are certainly lots of games. And no, they're not all the same. There are in fact a few basic types, and within each of these categories dwell a hundred and one subtle variations. Um, what fun...
IT'S A GAME OF TWO HALVES
That's right, one half management, the other half actually booting the ball around a bit. To kick off with we have the straightforward arcade simulation. This you should all be familiar with - a big green pitch (seen from above, or sometimes from the side), the roar of the crowd (well, the 'beep' of the crowd), lots of little men running around kicking the ball, and you up in the air somewhere above it all, doing your best to keep one or two of them (plus the ball) under control. What you don't have to worry about though is what any of the blokes are called, how much they're worth, or any other boring managerial-type stuff. Good examples of this kind of game are Matchday 2 and Kick Off.
The second main sub-division, the management game, is a totally different kettle of fish. No footie here at all (as such), apart from the results of various games flashing up on your screen every so often to tell you how you're doing. It's business acumen we're worried about here, with all sorts of weird and wonderful information popping up to confuse you - what your men are called, how tall they are, how skilful they can be and all sorts. A good example of this variety of game is, surprise, surprise, Football Manager.
The third, and crappiest, type of footie game is the pools prediction program. Now you may get really excited by the prospect of these (I don't know) but I find them so brain-blendingly boring that this is the only mention they'll get here, so enjoy it while you can. (Sorry and all that.)
Actually there's a fourth subdivision I've just remembered too - those games that provide you with an often quite bizarre mixture of action game and management, usually consisting of lots of lists of numbers with slightly dodgy bolt-on arcade bits thrown in. Some of them work quite well, but there's always the odd game that's simply too weird for words - like Roy Of The Rovers for example, part arcade adventure of all things and with a badly drawn Roy searching for his kidnapped team!
Best known in its 16 bit incarnations, the Speccy version of Kick Off (when it finally came out) proved to be quite a scrappy looking affair, with balls that went under the lines and goal markings that simply petered out for no reason whatsoever. But (but! but!) there still remained something to recommend it - the sheer speed with which it moved! There was no way you could accuse this game of slow and stodgy gameplay - the ball flew absolutely everywhere, bouncing around the players (overhead viewpoint, remember?) like the whole pitch was a giant pinball table or something. All of a sudden ninety percent of existing soccer games seemed pedestrian in the extreme. All in all then, it was easy to get into and a lot of fun (especially in two-player mode) but fell foul of some very scrappy graphics.
| Kit | 62% |
|---|---|
| Atmosphere | 73% |
| Playerbility | 83% |
| At The End Of The Day | 74% |
| Overall | 75% |
ST £19.95dk
Amiga £19.95dk
PC Out Soon
Spectrum £9.95cs, £14.95dk
C64 £9.95cs, £14.95dk
CPC £9.95cs, £14.95dk
Anco's championship-winning performance with Kick Off is down to the programming brilliance of Dino Dini, an Italian programmer who changed the rules of computer footy games. His revolutionary approach offered wide expanses of green grass, tiny footballers, but a very fast moving game. The effect was of a pitch that appeared to be realistic in scale, rather than the handkerchief-sized pitches that characterised so many other games.
Kick Off also offers a totally new method of trapping and passing - which again introduced a new level of realism. Not as pretty as most other computer soccer games but far more playable - and in this type of game the playability is everything.
There's just one bug in the lettuce here. The 8-bit versions of Kick Off, recently released, simply don't cut the mustard.
| Ace Rating | 935/1000 |
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