Reviews

1987 Scanatron (UK)
by Peter Martin

In the cover Howard Kendall says 'This must be the ultimate of all strategy games' and I must agree it is one of the best soccer managing games.
Appealing screens with excelent taste, 100% machine code and highly detailed options with an excelent accuracy value.
The only letdown was the match result of your coached team appearing instantly and 'destroying' the suspense factor, something I loved e.g. in 'Football Director'. But that diddnt spoiled the game at all. Well, maybe a little.
At the time I played this game I also played one of my all time favourite soccer management games: 'Tracksuit Manager' which I think is very similar to this in almost ever aspect. Me and my friends thought they were both from the same guys and from the same series. One for the Major League and the other for the World Cup. They arent. But I bet Doug Matthews, 'Tracksuit Manager' author, got great inspiration out of 'The Double' for its spectacular game released one year later.
A must have for every Speccy fan speccialy for those who love management games.

The Double taught me a lot about football management. For example, did you know the most important skill needed is to be able to predict what the attendance will be?
Yes, The Double is not your usual management game. For one thing it's one of only a handful not to be written in BASIC. For a genre that's all about number crunching that's most certainly a good thing. Speaking of numbers there's not a lot to be found here. Player's aren't given a numerical rating. Send a scout to look at a player and he'll present you with a short report. A typical scout's report would be
"Quick on his feet, a good finisher, liable to bite people, a snip at £220k". It's an interesting idea but makes it quite difficult to compare players as you can only hold 2 reports at any one time. Every time you send a scout on a new mission, his old report gets over written.
Unfortunately there's no match commentary or anything thing like that, instead the results from all 3 divisions scroll up the screen.
There's not a lot to do between games besides guessing the attendance of the next home game. Still it's quite absorbing and with a little more thought could've been a real classic.

The idea behind this is engaging but I was expecting much , much more ...

It's certainly one of the nicest looking football manager games I have ever played, but it's painfully slow and the keyboard controls don't respond well with it. If not for that this would have got a higher score. Worth a look anyways.