Can Roy save the day?

Producer: Gremlin Graphics
Football Tickets: £7.99 cass, £12.99 disk
Author: System Applied Technology

Crikey, Melchester Rovers are REALLY in trouble this time. The whole team (except Roy of course!) has been kidnapped and now greedy property developers want to buy up the Rovers'sacred ground - no doubt to build another hypermarket!

Only one person can save the club - you guessed it, Roy of the Rovers (blow the bugles, bang the drums, shake your rattles?!). Doing a fair impression of a private eye Roy dons his mac and sets off in search of his missing team mates (they probably buggered off down the pub!).

The search for the team forms the main arcade adventure section of the game, but there is also a five-a-side footy game (which can be played on its own). In the arcade adventure four menus are used to control Roy's actions, which include chatting to other characters and fighting. He can also pick up and manipulate objects to aid him in his dangerous quest. These include a pair of sunglasses to make him look so-o-o-o cool (just like the pizza man himself!?!).

Naturally if he succeeds in his quest then there's a prompt to load in the five-a-side game for a clash with some local rivals. (Are you sure he's successful? I thought there were eleven in a team - Ed.)

Unfortunately neither of the two sections is much cop. The main adventure has some easy-to- use menus, but there's a lack of any real interaction between characters. Graphics are colourful, but also very blocky, something which also mars the football game itself, where wobbly sprites jitter around a dull pitch. In addition the controls are unresponsive. Completely lacking any of the 'big match' atmosphere of the famous comic strip - this is another disappointing licence-based game.

PHIL ... 53%

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: colourful enough, but blocky all the same
Sound: not a lot to get worked up about
Options: play the full game or just the match itself

I've quite never managed to fall asleep while playing a computer game, well not until I played Roy Of The Rovers that is. It's just so boring. The main game is set in a town that you have to explore. Unfortunately getting lost is incredibly easy since all the streets look the same and the graphics are so crude it's almost painful to see. If I didn't know better I would have thought that the main characters had been blown up from something smaller, thus giving the terrible blocky look! As for the football game, well the graphics are just as bad and combined with boring gameplay it's one of the worst I've ever played. Where's the red card Ed?
NICK [33%]

Poor old Roy, he has to find his team mates before 7 pm or it's curtains for Melchester Rovers. Well, cynic that I am, I can't say this exactly has me in a cold sweat. Despite all Phil's efforts, football still bores me silly and the football game in this makes me wonder why anyone would ever want to watch the Melchester Rovers. It's more boring than watching it on the TV! The adventure section is a little better, but not much - in my opinion even hardened soccer fanatics could be put off the sport by playing this. One for the fans, then? Mmm... I doubt.
MARK [55%]

Gremlin
£7.99 cassette/£12.99 disk
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

"The lads done great, Brian, the lads done great." It's odd, isn't it, the way managers speak an entirely different language to the rest of us. You and I would have said "the lads have done well" or "the lads did well" or "the lads were great" - and I know a couple of people who'd've said "the lads, they're well wicked, narmean?". But "the lads done great"? Leave it it out, Brian.

The obvious explanation is the immense pressure these poor saps live under. I mean, look at them. Five matches without a win and they're off to the job centre, with only a sheepskin coat and a silly hairstyle to show for it all. But one man has survived where all the other managers have failed - Roy Race.

Yup, Roy hasn't done badly, I reckon. 1000 years on, he's still player-manager of table-topping Melchester Rovers, and all without a change of hairstyle. First in Tiger, and latterly in his own comic, Roy of the Rovers has confronted every known managerial hazard, from crippling injuries to freak hailstorms, and he's still there. The man's a ruddy miracle.

And now, thanks to Gremlin, he's been honoured yet further by becoming the hero of a computer game. Actually on Gremlin's recent form that's not up to much, but Roy Of The Rovers is a good deal better than the Gary Lineker titles. In fact there's quite a neat little game lurking in this unlikely package.

The plot is as ludicrous as ever (has someone been reading Billy The Fish?). Melchester Rovers is to be taken over by city property developers, and Roy Race has organised a celebrity 5-a-side tournament to raise funds to stop them. But lo! his entire team has been kidnapped, and Roy must whiz around the streets of Melchester, find his team members and get back to the ground by 5 o'clock - or all is lost.

Daft, eh? What this all leads to is a two-game package in which Roy first finds his team (or in my case doesn't) and then plays the celeb match.

The first part is much the more interesting. The streets of Melchester are conveniently arranged into a giant square grid (there's a map in the game's packaging), so around you wander, looking for clues (ooowah) and talking to people as you meet them. By flipping the roads around 90° every time you turn a corner, the computer makes sure you're always travelling from left to right or vice versa. This can be confusing at first - but Gremlin tried this before with Deathwish III (less successfully, as the game needed faster reactions), and thanks to a useful compass you soon get used to it.

As well as moving around you can also activate certain windows. Yes, it's impersonate-a-Macintosh time again, as windows pull down from the horizontal menu at the top to reveal all manner of options, including "chat" to anyone you happen to bump into or, even more bizarrely, "smile". But then that's like real life - grin at the wrong person and you'll find yourself beaten up for your troubles.

The puzzles here are tricky and not easily solved, and the fact that you have a limited amount of time to do it means that when you get to play the football match, you do so initially with just one player - Roy Race. Galling though this is, it does in fact help you practise for future games, when with luck you'll finally get to rescue a player or two and have a little more help punting the pill past the celeb goalie.

If the game is let down by anything, in fact, it's in the football department. Yes, I know, we've seen millions of these games now and none of them is a patch on Match Day 2, but the way everyone comes up with ever more tatty and unplayable versions of that classic is deeply disheartening. There's got to be another way of representing footie on the Spectrum. But that said, this one's not that bad a game of Speccy boot - the whole shebang wouldn't be worth playing if it were - but I wouldn't suggest you buy the game for that part alone. Control is tricky, it's all but impossible to tell the two teams apart, and it's a matter of the greatest fortune if you manage to score a goal.

No, the attraction of the game is the way the two parts combine so neatly. In most of these multi-game packages, the various parts are entirely separate, but here how well you do in part two depends to a great extent on how well you did in part one. The programmers were System Applied Technology of Sheffield (crazy name, crazy guys) and they've done a good job.

Final trivia note: You may have thought this game came out yonks ago. Well, it didn't, although Piranha originally had the licence and went on and on about it, advertising it, putting it on its release schedule, the works. When the company went down the tubes, the licence became free again, and Gremlin snapped it up. An impressive performance, eh, Roy?

"The lads done great, Brian, the lads done great."

Sigh.

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!

Here's another oddball that doesn't quite fit into the scheme of things. It's a footie-based arcade adventure, with all that that suggests. Yes, you have to plod found the round hundreds of screens, collect things and talk to people. There's even a plot - the whole Melchester Rovers team has been kidnapped just before a key fund-raising match. If the money doesn't get raised developers will move in and flatten the ground! What a shame.

There's also a fairly reasonable arcade footie sim tacked onto the end (for the bit where you've managed to rescue the team and then have to take part in the match) which can be practiced without having to play through the adventure bit. It's not what you might call 'state of the art', but it'll do. Bizarrely enough, it's not too bad a package, really - puzzles to solve, balls to kick and absolutely no lists of numbers to worry about.

Label: Gremlin
Author: System Applied Technology
Price: £7.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Steve Mahony

Here we go, here we go, here we gooo!!!

So, Roy of the Rovers, the legendary comic book footballer, is here - courtesy of Gremlin, by way of destitute Piranha Software.

We find Roy (screams from the fans) trying to find the other four members of the five-a-side football squad he's playing with. They have been kidnapped and are being held somewhere in Melchester, Roy's home town (Oh, purplease! - GT). If he doesn't rescue them within the time limit, he will have to play the match with the mates he has managed to save. A map of Melchester is given with the instructions, so it's just a case of checking around and following leads given by the various characters, such as Roy's mum (Barf).

The graphics in this section are reasonable but are used in a very uninteresting way with dull looking buildings. But if you think the graphics are bad, think yourself lucky that you don't have to put up with the sound (YAWN) which consists of a sparse little tune on loading and not much else.

After 2.3 milliseconds of playing, I decided I'd had enough of this because what with Afterburner, Robocop and the like, who wants to play this resurrection of nearly every walking around and exploring locations game ever written.

So, not too impressed (as you might have guessed by now) I tried the other part. The second part is the aforementioned football game which has some serious faults. The footballer's graphics are the same graphics which were used to animate Roy in the first bit. Some are shaded to signify which team they belong to (as if it makes much difference, because the computer is really, really, really hard).

At the end of all this searching and finding and looking and any other moving around and doing-bugger-all-type verbs and once you finally manage to beat the computer (highly unlikely), what happens? Eh? Come on? What?

You get a scrolly congrats message and that's it! So, in the words of somebody bumbitingly famous, 'What you've got to ask yourself is... is it worth the dosh?'...

Really, after some of the games that Gremmo have produced, such as Super Sports and the impressive Techocop, they really should be doing better.

One point to mention, if you are keen enough on Roy to buy this, notice that when a goal is scored a great spine jellying roar goes up from the crowd - THERE IS NO CROWD. LOOK AT THE PICS. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

Thinking positively, you could buy this game for the worst, fartbaggiest enemy you have and send it to him/her for Christmas. Otherwise don't bother.

Gremlin replay a comic hero.

The whole of Melchester Rovers has been kidnapped, and it is up to Roy Of The Rovers (who must have been polishing his Porsche or a starlet's bottom at the time, thus avoiding capture) to find them before the big match. This is the scenario for the first section of ROTR, a true-blue, pull-down-menu driven arcade adventure, which for some reason puts me in mind of Andy Capp. You wander around a map of Melchester (supplied with the game) and follow the slightly leaden clues until you do, or indeed don't (it doesn't seem to matter) find the lost team.

Then you are asked to load the footy section of the game. The missing players are miraculously restored, and this is where the game's story falls down. If the Rovers lose the match, the developers can move in and build a block of flats. If they win, then the team can carry on to thrill the crowds and please the readers with their antics, and, who knows, maybe even earn a Fleetway comic annual all to themselves!

The arcade adventure section is well implemented, for sure, but lacks real sparkle and any kind of incentive to complete the task in hand. The footy game is very difficult to control, and you often find yourself running in exactly the opposite direction from the way you'd like to be going. I thought the problem might be a duff joystick, but the game misbehaved with every one I tried, including the trusty Konix Navigator. So thumbs down all round, which is a bit of a shame as the idea had possibilities.

Strolling around the streets looking for clues can be a challenge for some, I know, but to me this adventure's a little lacking in the kind of design points that make the task enjoyable. What it needs is a really cracking football game to act as an antidote. Unfortunately, it doesn't have one.

Reviewer: Phil South

RELEASE BOX
C64/128, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Out Now
Spec 128, £7.99cs, Out Now

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 0/100
1 hour: 85/100
1 day: 50/100
1 week: 50/100
1 month: 20/100
1 year: 10/100

MACHINES: C64, Spec, Ams
SUPPLIER: Gremlin
PRICE:
VERSION TESTED: C64, Spec

(To be read in the style of Norman Lovett). Oh dear. Boo hoo, 80% of the Melchester Rovers five-a-side team has been kidnapped. That's four of the five players, if you hadn't already guessed. Nobby, Spunky, Tossy and Veiny have all been abducted by some evil criminal mind, and it's all down to one man to save them - Roy of the Rovers. Yeah!

Instead of going for the usual boring approach of trying to come up with a single decent game, Gremlin have quite originally gone for the rather odd approach of putting two very poor games together. Does it work well? Does it heck.

The first of the two games is imaginatively entitled Roy: The Adventure. This is the full-blown exciting escapade as you guide Roy around the streets of Melchester, talking, smiling and fighting with the people he meets. The game is viewed as a side-on scroller, with roads cutting through the plane of vision, both into and out of the plane of the screen. These streets can be moved onto by moving Roy in the general direction of the intersection and pushing up or down to move into or out of the screen.

A menu system is used to run the game in a method not unlike the GEM system used on the ST. A menu bar at the top of the screen has four choices, each of which can be selected via a certain key on the keyboard. Each bar brings up a different window, which does different things. Select the Extras option, and you can stop and chat or fight with anyone who may be standing near you, or, simply smile at them, shown by a large, Colgatey gleam around the general vicinity or Roy's mouth.

Graphics aren't too bad for this section. The C64's graphics are far superior to the Spectrum's due to the good use of colour and reasonable sprite definition. The sound is limited to some spot effects and tunette here. and there.

The second section is an appalling five-a-side football game which is just so bad, I couldn't play it for anymore than a few minutes. Correction. I couldn't play it for anymore than a few minutes. Correction. I couldn't play it. The graphics are pathetic, the gameplay is slow and frustratingly unresponsive.

The controls are slack and the fun level is dangerously close to nonexistent. The ball never leaves the floor - even when the goalie kicks the ball out, it merely ends up as a gentle roll along the floor.

Roy of the Rovers is a pathetic attempt at both an adventure and a football game. Stick to Microsoccer or Emlyn Hughes International Soccer if you're after something a little more footbally. As for representing the feel of the comic successfully, well, at least my finger won't go through the tape.