I suppose I might as well review Jimmy's other football management game, called Jimmy's Soccer Manager which was released before Super League.
The game starts with a period of waiting via a black screen, then finally a please wait notice appears, after this we go straight to the main menu, for in this game you are the manager of Kettering United starting in Division 5, which is your non-league Football Conference. In the main menu we can view the squad which is largely the same from the other Jimmy game. Here you select your team and transfer list players as well as display info about them, which again is similar to Jimmy 2, it displays the name, age, position, skill, stamina, speed, aggression, goals and morale as well as their portraits. The transfer market is where you buy new players, here there are three players to choose from, which for me includes a G. Lineker for Runcorn. After selecting your player you have to make a bid which can be agreed or refused. You can only visit the transfer market once per week. You can also view the league table and change the admission fee from between £1 and £5.
So let's play a match now. Here there is no pitch and no commentary, it's just a largely black screen with the score and a very fast timer, I even had to check if I sped up the emulator, which I didn't, it really is that fast. So it's one of those games where you just wait for the score to update. After the match is over we see the other results and then after some waiting we see the match attendance followed by the income and expenditure report for the week, and then it's back to the menu. There are occassions that incidents take place, such as injuries and players wanting a word with you about a rise in their salary which you can agree or refuse their demand, this actually happens quite a lot in the game and this can get repetitive quite quickly. And when you refuse the demand the player asks for a transfer every single week until you agree to the transfer. So you essentially have a squad full of moaning minnies.
So Jimmy's Soccer Manager is quite speedy compared to the dull, slow paced BASIC management games but repetition sets in probably too quickly with players demanding a raise nearly every week. While it lacks the options of various management games it is largely straightforward as most of them could be complex with a lot of things to do, here it is more simplified. What doesn't make this game fun apart from its repetition of players wanting a word is that your team doesn't do quite well and is quite weak which requires you to sign new players, but most of the good players are expensive and you can't afford them, so you are largely stuck with what you have, which you'll tend to end up losing more than win.
Jimmy's Soccer Manager could have been better, but comparing it to Jimmy's Super League it could have been worse as well. Therefore based on that it doesn't do an awful lot like a number of management games, yet it offers more enjoyment than Jimmy's Super League, I think a score of 3 is rather fair.
