Producer: D&H Games
Retail Price: £9.99
Author: John de Salis and Tony Huggard

Wheel and deal in the football world, matching the cut and thrust on the pitch with the Machiavellian intrigues that lurk in the boardrooms of big-time sport.

As a team manager, you appoint coaches, physiotherapists and scouts, make bids for stars and sell declining players to raise money.

Matches are automatically played between your team and the other sides in your league. After full time a final score is shown, complete with scoring players and score times. The results of other matches in your league are also shown, and with each completed set of fixtures the ever-changing league table showing your position can be called up.

You can also get an update on your squad, telling you the number of goals it's scored and conceded, the number of games it's played, and whether it's carrying any injuries.

Just as important, of course, is an accurate statement of your financial condition. If your bank balance isn't enough to support all your deals, you can arrange loans, overdrafts and mortgages, or sell shares in your club to cover your financial shortfall.

Remember the bread-and-butter expenses that are incurred every week, such as wage bills and general running costs. Regular income to offset these includes gate money, interest payments from the bank and TV broadcast fees.

There's an active transfer market in which you can boost a flagging team by buying the best players - or raise money by setting them. Bids can fail, though, leaving you intensely disappointed when you're unable to persuade your favoured player to come to you instead of plumping for the exciting football adventure that is Grimsby Town.

Out of all your transfer dealings the government takes a third of the fee, and it takes 15% of any gambling wins you make.

At the end of the season, if not before, your financial decisions can break or make the club you run. So poverty or riches, glory or bust may await you just round the corner...

COMMENTS

Joysticks: none
Graphics: text-only game; ugly colour
Sound: minimal FX

Football Director tries to dominate the Spectrum football market and bury the rival Football Manager for good. It fails dismally. Football Director holds all the features (not attractions) of the old favourite - slow responses, no graphics, glaring colour. And the inlay is extremely uninformative. Football Direct is a slow and poor imitation of a very overrated predecessor. The high price is ten times more surprising than the game.
PAUL [11%]

Football Director is the worst game I've seen for months, and is worse than Football Manager. The colour is unattractive, and the black-on-white text could become hard on the eyes - if anyone has the patience/lack of intelligence required to play Football Director for more than half an hour.
MIKE [8%]

Get ready, all you intellectuals out there - you'll need an O level in Football Studies just to load this up! Like the other football management games, Football Director is text-only and very boring. You can choose what to call the players and the teams, but that doesn't brighten up this drab simulation.
NICK [19%]

D&H
£8.95

Although most of the games industry has been cornered by the big companies with their vast marketing spends, advertising budgets and freebie lunches for Dr Berkman (more, please!), there's one tiny sector that's still well under control of the independents - the footie management simulation. It's probably got much to do with the massive success of Kevin Toms' Football Manager, which has bobbed in and out of the charts for nigh on five years and is probably the best selling Speccy game ever. (Is it? I'd be interested to find out.)

The best of the current crop is D&H Games Football Director, which is about to be made widely available after some time on mail order only. Written by De Salis and Huggard it's a no-frills sim which cuts out any unnecessary graphics and attempts at arcade action and sticks to what footie sim fans really want - pure strategy. The packaging's modest - a simple inlay card with the barest of instruction - but if you're interested in a game like this, you're going to know exactly what's required, and what you don't get immediately you'll pick up along the way.

Starting at the bottom of Div 4 (where else?) you must pick your team and battle through a full league programme without throwing all your money away. You can mortgage your club when the going gets tough (which it will) and also borrow dosh from the bank. There's a full timetable of League, FA Cup, League Cup and European matches. Players have skill points, which are influenced by morale, which is naturally decided by winning or not. Morale is surprisingly fragile. There are appalling hazards all along the way - injuries, sendings off, postponements, crowd violence, retirements, interest, tax, other managers trying to poach your players, even sackings. There are fixture lists, automatic updatings of the league, midweek games, the opportunity to buy or sell shares, international games, loads of transfers and even three skill levels. It makes Football Manager look like a tatty old Basic game. If you like this sort of thing (which I do), you'll love this.

If you have problems finding it in the shops, send £8.95 (cheque/PO) to D & H Games, 9 Melne Road, Stevenage, Herts SG2 8LL. Oh, and remember to save regularly - it has the occasional tendency to crash!

THE YS FOOTBALL

Yes, it's Autumn, the time of year when people go out into the cold to play football. What a noble game it is, what with refs, subs and Desmond Lynam. We ordered JAMES LEACH to go and play four recent £3.99 releases from D&H Games. We also invited wacky TV footballing funsters, Saint and Greavsie to comment on the games (just to add that souppon of expert opinion).

According to the box Football Director is 'The Ultimate Football Challenge'. Well, I'm not so sure. Surely playing football (blindfold) for real against West Germany is the ultimate challenge? But never mind.

They haven't changed the character set with this one so all looks a bit, well, Speccyish, I suppose. There aren't any graphics, which speeds up the gameplay but also makes things look quite, er, boring.

What else? Oh yes, Football Director is probably the most crash-proof of the four I've been looking at. It's quite important, is crash-proof-ness (cos when I'm losing I tend to hit all the keys on the Speccy as hard as I can).

Greavsie says: I've got this painful boil on the back of me neck, Saint.

Saint says: Hee hee hee, oh you'll be the death of me, Greavsie, with that humour of yours!

Label: D&H, 19 Milne Road, Stevenage, Herts SG2 8LL
Author: Huggard & DeSallis
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: none
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

It must be getting hard to think of new titles for football simulations, what with Football Manager. World Cup Fiasco (sorry, Carnival), Soccer Boss, International Soccer and so on ad nauseam. If you seriously think that simulating it on a computer is worthwhile when you could be watching it on the TV or even playing it in the sunshine, Football Director has all the features you could want: four leagues, twenty teams each, definable teams, substitutions, sending offs, buying and selling players and shares, finance, tax, even sackings and crowd violence. Graphics are non-existent, instructions are minimal and there's an adorable feature by which after you've saved a game position to tape, the program crashes at the end of every season. If you can put up with that, then you should get a fair kick out of Football Director. (Kick - geddit?) More sophis than Football Manager, Director may be, but then that's now a quarter of the price.

Spectrum £9.99cs
C64 £9.99cs
CPC £9.99cs

D&H have been making footy games for donkeys' years. Football Director is one of the their first and remains one of the best. Sophisticated game play makes it suitable for the serious soccer strategist. Football Director II is now also available with even more options, plus ST (£19.99dk) and Amiga (£19.99dk) and PC (£19.99dk) versions. Available for all computers.