Producer: Top Ten Hits
Retail Price: £1.99

You've come a long way since managing the Wigan Wagglebottoms American football team. The USA called and now you are in great demand.

In your coach's bank balance you have a cool quarter-million bucks. With this mountain of greenbacks you can buy and sell players in an attempt to field the best team, beat the other clubs and win in that good of American sporting tradition, the Superbowl.

At the start of the game you can choose your level of coaching expertise, and the team you'll to propel to victory. But to improve the team and achieve your ambitions you have access to the transfer market.

You can call up financial statements showing your balance, the availability of loans and any loan repayments outstanding, and arrangements for making loan repayments appear before each match. There's also a fist of available players can be called up, showing their value and skill and energy levels. And yet another list allows reserve players to substitute for playing members so that advantage can be taken of their enhanced energy or skill levels.

When a game is in progress on the field, the morale, skill and energy levels of both teams are shown and these are crucial in determining the outcome - though luck can play its part. The match is shown in 3-D, with both sides lining up on the gridiron.

At the end of the match other recent fixture results are shown, and these are further translated into league-table positions. A financial report then displays the gate money from that match, interest payment, the wage bill and your bank balance.

To measure your progress en route to the big time, a rating screen shows the total value of your squad, its morale, skill and energy levels, the team's league position and your rating as coach... because success depends on you.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: none
Graphics: limited - Mike gave them 02%

I must admit to once being addicted to Quarter Back magazine, which deals entirely with the play of this contorted version of rugby - but Grid Iron deals entirely with the management side. There are plenty of chirpy features but plenty of problems too; for instance, you can't make more than one change in the team unless you've got an injured player. Grid Iron is enjoyable to sit down with for a long time, but I look forward to a game where you can really play American football.
BYM [73%]

Grid Iron is the worst sports game I have ever played. There is simply nothing to it but inaccuracy after inaccuracy. Players can do more or less anything - you can get a team made up entirely of quarterbacks - which makes the simplistic game much too easy: if you manage to get a good team (hardly difficult) nothing can touch you. The financial aspect doesn't make sense either; I played the entire league, beating everyone by a huge margin, and still had a balance of about $100,000 without having taken any loans. I then won the Superbowl 28-0 (notice the way that your team and your opponents only score in multiples of seven, yet all the other games in the league have completely random scores...) and acquired an $80,000 debt. How? I don't know. But any money you invest in Grid Iron will be wasted.
MIKE [06%]

Top Ten
£1.99
Reviewer: David Powell

I hate games like this - they give reviewers a bad name. But having been disappointed by Ocean's Super Bowl (two player only), and with Mind Games' American Football which basically falls into the guessing game category, I had high hopes for this NFL-inspired management game, especially considering my love of the sport.

It might have been an idea, though, if the author, Keith Goodyer, had spent less time on his witty hackers' message and more on his programming skills.

Although the game has five skill levels, level one practically assures a victory and level five guarantees a dismal last place (after 35 minutes of pure tedium in both cases). You may transfer players (only one trade per game) and you can borrow money, all to help you increase the strength of your team.

But the action, even allowing for the atrocious graphics, shows only touchdowns and incompletion. No tackling or anything approaching realism is used here or anywhere else. What happened to the inter-league divisions? And games are decided randomly, heavily influenced by the chosen skill level.

About the best feature is a facility to save to microdrive, which is pretty gripping. Believe me, this is a prize turkey.

Label: Top Ten
Author: Sparklers
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: None
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Most sports games these days are managerial type games in which you must pick your brain and make crucial decisions that could be vital to your team's future. This is not the case here.

Don't get me wrong. It is a managerial game, it's just that none of the decisions you make have the slightest effect on your team as they win every single match they get and then win the superbowl. I did this on my first go and was more than a little disheartened.

The game is displayed in the usual format, I nice menus and tables, but I laugh at the (and I quote) '3D match graphics'. What they boil down to is a few diagonal lines and little black and white stick figures.

Grid Iron was released as Touchdown USA on the Sparklers label and was greeted with a little less than enthusiasm then. What chance does it have now?