Get your own back on England's international team

Producer: Goliath Games
Transfer Fee: £9.95 cass
Author: Doug Matthews

'Koeman sends a beautiful long ball over to Gullit, who weaves and turns straight past Gary Stevens. He sends a beautiful chip into the box. Oh no, the defence has failed to clear, Marco Van Bastes takes possession and... he's scored his hat-trick-surely England are out of this championship now!'

You were undoubtedly as peeved at England's performance in the European Championship as we all were at CRASH Towers (Mark Caswell excepted cos he keeps falling over his own feet and can't see the point of football). But Doug Matthews (he also did The Double) reckons you deserve to have money for a mouth and prove your TV punditry (surely that should be 'banditry' - ED) by building your own national squad to take on the best in Europe (and the rest of the world) in Goliath's new football management game, Tracksuit Manager.

You can choose to manage any European national squad of 22 players. New players can be drafted into the squad from a pool of 100. The finals of the Nations Cup (European Championship) are two years away (with the World Cup finals in four years time), but first your team must qualify by winning their group which contains three other nations. Friendlies can be arranged to allow experimentation with the team or you can go on a tour consisting of five matches.

Tactics and options are menudriven. The main menu is for changing the squad, arranging fixtures (through the diary option) sending scouts to spy on the performance of other teams and their individual players.

Before a match, you select your team of 11 players from the squad and a report on each player's current form and skill is available. After team selection, a choice of tactics can be made including attacking style, marking, formation, and various types of tackling and passing. Individual players can also be given special orders contradicting those of the team and can also be told to take corners, free-kicks etc.

During the match a scrolling text commentary (which can be speeded up or slowed down) is shown in the top half of the screen, while the position of the ball is represented below by a red bar on a green pitch. Substitutions can be made at any time and also allow the changing of tactics. Players can be injured, and, if they're naughty, booked or even sent off.

There's enormous wealth of football data in this program, so I expressed no surprise at the game's bland presentation, although it's neatly laid out. Sound is nonexistent and match graphics are minimal. Text predominates of course, so it's annoying how slow it can be updating at times. On the other hand, it's the football strategy that matters, and Tracksuit Manager certainly scores no home goals there.

PAUL [76%]

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: keyboard only
Graphics: minimalistic, to say the least, but not that important in this type of game
Sound: there is absolutely none
Options: choice of managing any European national squad

'clumsy feet' Caswell here, and all I have to say is that some people may be willing to sit through reams and reams of text from yet another football management game, but I'm not. Tracksuit Manager bored me stiff within a very short time indeed. I've come to the conclusion that only true footballing fans could possibly enjoy scanning the eye-boggling amount of text that assails the player's optic nerves. The actual matches are the biggest bore; described in great detail, they sent me to sleep after reading that Hoddle was about to shoot for goal third time in a row. I'll stick to saving the universe from the alien hordes, thankyouverymuch.
MARK [38%]

The range of menus and options is impressive - especially the choice of tactics for both the team and individual players. It really allows for complex strategy and gives the sort of comprehensive control over the team that other games of the genre lack. What lets the game down is its boring match presentation - the commentator quite obviously suffers from verbal diarrhoea. By the end of a match you feel as if you've just read War And Peace. The pitch graphic is small and simple - a red bar shows the position of the ball and that's it! What a shame the excellent tactical options couldn't have been accompanied by some decent graphics to help create an atmosphere. Long-winded, it's best played in short bursts, but considering its detailed options, Tracksuit Manager will definitely appeal to football mangagement buffs.
PHIL [71%]

Goliath
£9.95
Reviewer: Phil South

I'm not much of a one for these footy management games, y'know, but I'm amazed at this one. In most cases strategic football games are text heavy, with lots of accounts and admin stuff to worry about. Tracksuit Manager is surprisingly different though, as here the emphasis is firmly on the football matches you play, along with rating for players and teams.

Apparently the writer of the game went to FIFA and got the names and ratings of every player in every World Cup team on the earth, and they're all here IN THIS GAME. Every single football player in the world, with data on his style of play, weaknesses, strengths, and so on. The strategic elements are very complex, but it's up to you how deeply into the game you go. That's the real beauty of it. Like all the best games the idea is very simple, but so effectively executed that it's addictive, exciting to play and satisfying to finish.

When you watch a game, you read a blow-by-blow account (see the screenshot) as if on the jolly old World Of Sport teleprinter. The passes, the shots, the near misses, all the thrills and spills... what? You don't think watching a football match in text only is going to be much fun? Well okay, neither did I, but for some reason I can't put my finger on, this is one of the most addictive parts of the whole shooting match. Watching the game unfold in front of you like a text adventure. It's a weird way to enjoy yourself, but I love it.

The other thing which is nice is the depth of the detail in the game. Each players' details are there, and you can look up each player in your own and those of opposing teams and carefully match their abilities. You can really manage the team, pitting your finest selection against the odds in the international arena. Just call me Robbo.

So, although its got not very much in the way of graphics (there are some nice frames for the text, but that's about it) Tracksuit Manager does have a lot to recommend itself as a worthwhile game, especially for those players who enjoy flexing the muscle between their ears. Okay, so TM would have been totally brilliant, except for the fact that it's just a football management game. Admittedly it's a good one, but it's still an unoriginal concept. The execution, however, is excellent. Some day, all footy games will be made this way. If you haven't got any football strategy games, then buy this one. If you have got some, then you might still enjoy this one as a slightly different approach. Basically what I'm telling you is if you don't like Tracksuit Manager, you're dead from the neck up.

RICH PELLEY and JON PILLAR - as nice of couple of young chaps as you could ever hope to meet. So we locked them up in the...

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Hi-Tec
£2.99
Reviewer: Jon Pillar

If you know my feelings about management games, you'll realise that if I said "Tracksuit Manager is quite good," it'd be like Lord Lucan turning up as the killer in Twin Peaks (ie pretty unbelievable).

Tracksuit Manager is an absolute corker. It's a pure' management game (graphics? Wot graphics?) and it's got more comprehensive features than a month of Sunday's colour supplements. A full World Cup competition! Single fixtures or world tours! Teams that refuse to play friendlies if they think your side is crap! Scouting out opponents! Changing team or individual players' tactics! Losing to countries you've never heard of!... The list is characteristically endless. But the words any management fan really wants to hear are - it's menu driven, and (hurrah!) it's in machine code. While you plot your strategies through a system more friendly than a slightly drunk Glaswegain, your Speccy manages the rest of the world in, ooh about five seconds. (No more gently-chugging Basic pauses - bliss!)

And the icing on the cake is the running commentary, as you anxiously follow the results of all your plans. It's paced just right to have you gnawing the table with tension as the (real-time) match unfolds before you in admirable detail (and in my case yet again ending in losing to Albania). There's even a deliberate pause before you find out if your team's shot at goal has succeeded - sheer sadism! (You can speed all this up though if you want to.)

It may not be everyone's cup of tea thence my overall mark) but if you're even vaguely a fan then do rush out and buy this. It's worthy of the highest accolade from the Management Master himself - the Kevin Toms 'Beardy'. (And I can't state it clearer than that.)

Label: Goliath Games
Author: In-house
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

The idea behind Tracksuit Manager, as with all the other footie sims, is to guide your team to victory in both the Nations Cup (otherwise known as the European Cup) and then the World Cup. The entire game is set as a huge loop, first you play through the Nations Cup, and then you go through the World Cup which takes 4 years altogether (game time, not real time, this isn't Football Director 2, you know). I can quite safely say that Tracksuit Manager is the best of its genre, as this is an area that's relatively untapped. As far as I can remember, the only other games to cover this field are World Cup Manager and International Manger.

The entire game, as you may have noticed, is set out in the form of windows and boxes and all looks very neat. The screen presentation is top rate in all respects with the programmers making full use of different sized lettering and very tasteful colour schemes.

TSM is, unsurprisingly, menu-operated, with any available commands contained in a little window at the bottom of the screen, and a joystick is used to cycle through and select.

The depth of strategy in TSM is what makes it stand out way ahead of the rest. That and the amazing technical specifications. You have all the usual options of who you want to put where, as is to be expected, and there is a lot more. You can give overall instructions to the team, such as how you want them to play (i.e. attacking or defensive), and you can tell them how long to keep their shots, long for distance, short for accuracy, and more besides (see box). Then, to add even more depth, you have an individual player tactics screen, with which you can tell each player individually what to do, such as stay up, take penalties and so on.

The match itself is completely different to anything else you might have seen before. Instead of high res full colour graphics, you get a small drawing of a pitch with a highlighted strip to show the area in which the ball is currently residing. Above the box is the thing that sets TSM away from anything else ever seen on any other football game. A continuous flow of text gives you a running commentary of exactly what is going on. If you've ever played Football Director for a few hours, you'll know the frustration of waiting for that winning goal to come up on screen. Goliath has managed to cram an awful lot into the 48K Speccy. Unfortunate though that the newspaper reports have had to be dropped. However, they have managed to get (huurgh deep breath) over 800 'real' players with all the same statistics as they have in real life, 54 computer managed teams, 'intelligent' opponents and 2 spelling mistakes ('subtitute' and penaltys'). After all this, I have been told, there were only 2 spare bytes left, and the general Goliath joke is, 'How come you've still got two bytes left?'... Har-de-har-har.

TSM is brilliant. It's got everything a good strategy game needs. Good, clean layout, good game speed and it's very easy to use. Buy it.

Goliath over the moon.

Football games have always teen big sellers and hardly a month goes by without someone claiming to have released the "ultimate" simulation. This one dispenses with the money and administration side of things and lets you get on with team management.

You're in control of a European national team - it doesn't have to be one of the home countries - and are trying to qualify for, and win, the Nations and World Cups. Everything is run via the calendar - group matches, friendlies, tours and the finals.

Your control over the team is extensive - you can choose from a squad of 100 players, each with individual reports on them and face opponents who can be inspected to similar depth.

There's no graphic action for the games, but you can have kick-by-kick reports of games if you want them. These are very detailed but do take a long time. You can speed these up, or for matches not involving your team get just a quick statistical breakdown of the games.

Other teams and players can be scouted to assess their strengths and weaknesses. There's tremendous variety in the tactics that the team and individual players can use.

Its not a football game to be played lightly because you have to analyse a lot of information to get the best team and results. This means it takes a lot of work before you get rewarding results. It also means that football freaks will be able to get totally immersed in it.

Reviewer: Bob Wade

RELEASE BOX
Spec, £9.95cs, Reviewed
Amiga, £19.95dk, Imminent
Atari ST, £19.95dk, Imminent
Ams, £9.95cs, Imminent
C64/128, £9.95cs, Imminent
IBM PC, £24.95dk, Imminent

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 55/100
1 hour: 50/100
1 day: 50/100
1 week: 50/100
1 month: 50/100
1 year: 40/100

Spectrum £9.99cs
C64 £9.99cs
CPC £9.99cs
ST £19.99dk
Amiga £19.99dk
PC Out Soon

The ultimate management game with just about every possible situation that might confront a manager covered. Totally icon-driven and offering all sorts of features, including things like newspaper reports, match tactics, manager's diary, scouts, a choice of one thousand players from fifty five countries. Plays very slickly and with a good deal humour.

C64 review, but the versions are nigh-on identical.

MACHINES: Spectrum/CBM 64/Amstrad/BBC/Atari ST/Amiga
SUPPLIER: Domark
PRICE: £9.95 Spec/Ams/C64/BBC, £14.95 Spec +3/Ams disk, £19.95 Atari ST/Amiga
VERSION TESTED: Spectrum

Goliath is a name you may not have heard a lot about, but it's a name that will be talked about quite a lot, considering the strength of this, the company's first entry into the software market. It is, and this is no exaggeration, the best ever football managerial game, ever, in the history of the world, no messing, straight up, honest. A claim you'd normally only hear from a PR company, but for me to write it, it must be something good.

You are given the task of managing the England squad, or any of 54 other countries, and gently nursemaiding them through first the European Cup (Nations Cup) and then the World Cup. As far as I can remember, and that's quite far despite my tender years, there has never been a true managerial game. There's always been a bit of administration and accountancy thrown in, which I have always found to put a dampener on the fun.

In Tracksuit Manager, you are only the manager. You know how they're going to play, and above all, win.

Glancing back over the four managerial duties, some of you might stop and think to yourselves that one and two have been done before, but what's this thing about 'how they're going to play'. As well as tackling an almost untapped field of the genre, namely international football, Goliath have gone for a far more involving and sophisticated approach to the match. With the use of a couple of menus, you can piece together a very complicated strategy very quickly.

Using the Team Tactics menu, you can set formation, playing style (attacking, defensive), length of passes, tackling, style, general defence system (sweeper, offside trap) plus a general guide to how you want the team to play the full match (slow build up, fast build up, fast counter attacks). All this generalisation not involving enough for you? Fine, just switch to the player tactics menu. With this you can tell a player exactly how to play, who to mark, where to play, whether to take tree kicks, penalties, thrown-ins or corners and lots more.

The matches themselves are a piece of masterful programming. A small diagram of the pitch and a highlighted band provide all the graphical bits with the purpose only to show where the ball is.

The incredible thing about the matches is the commentary. Whilst playing, you are given a running update on all action on the pitch. Stuff like "Lacey gets the ball. Lacey runs upfield. Williams brings down Lacey" and so on for the length of the match, which incidentally, is variable. Anything from sixteen seconds to 90 minutes, by using the joystick to give all the details about the match, such as the number of goal attempts, fouls, bookings, sending offs and more besides. The same thing happens after any other matches, which amazingly only take less than a second to play.

The main aim of the game alongside providing hours of fun, I am told, is accuracy. Over a thousand real players are contained within the program, and statistics are held on all of them; such as passing accuracy, confidence, skill, heading accuracy and tons more, along with their home clubs, caps and goals scored. Needless to say Maradonna is the best player I could find, with no less than five statistics at Brilliant level.

All of the usual stuff is also contained, such as group tables, fixture lists and the most impressive scout reports I've ever seen. The one thing that really adds pleasure to the game and can decide whether you feel good or not about your 1-0 win over Albania are the newspaper reports. After every match you play, you are given two newspaper headlines from the Daily Slag and the Sporting Knife. 'Cute' little messages like "Simmons goofs up" and "Gene leads us to victory" along with many more can boost or drop your ego.

The whole game is joystick controlled and all options are selected from a little bar at the base of the screen. The presentation is very clean and professional, with the screen divided and redivided into various windows and any and all useful information is always on-screen.

As I've already stated, Tracksuit Manager is the best ever managerial game and a very impressive start for Goliath. If you like football get it. If you like strategy, get it. If you want one of the best 8-bit games around at the moment, get it.

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £9.95
Amstrad CPC Cassette: £9.95

THE GIANTS OF FOOTBALL

Doug Matthews, the designer of Tracksuit Manager is a familiar name when it comes to football strategy/management games, having previously designed The Double handled by Johnson Scanatron. That title covered the UK League and FA Cup matches, now Tracksuit Manager intends cleaning up on the international football front, this time through Doug's own company, Goliath Games.

The scene for Tracksuit Manager is one of failure, with the country's top football team failing dismally in the World Cup. Its time to get a new manager and, as you are the rising star in football management, you get the job.

The first task is to select the squad which will prepare for, and play through, the Nations Cup to the finals and hopefully the World Cup thereafter. As the game is set in the arena of international football management it is not restricted to the England team. You can choose from 32 countries. Once a team is selected, each player's name, position and (if needed) club team must be entered before they join the squad. Each team's cumulative performance levels, playing characteristics and skills are based on the performance of the real-life teams themselves. After team setup, the eight league tables are randomly generated in preparation for the forthcoming Cup seasons.

The screen display follows the same format throughout the game, with the current menu title at the top, the commands and actions being displayed in the middle section and the menu commands taking up the lower portion of the screen. From the main menu eight options can be accessed, the DATE option advances the time immediately to the next match to be played. SQUAD allows the manager to determine the structure of his squad, defining the number of goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and reserves. A report can be called up detailing a player's capabilities, reactions, skill, confidence and stamina levels - useful for determining whether they are fit enough to be in the squad.

The number of caps gained and goals scored are also displayed. The scout option sends a scout to watch other teams and their players in action, reporting back on the team's playing style, lineup, overall performance level and individual player's strengths and weaknesses.

BLOW BY BLOW

When your team is ready, the PLAY option becomes accessible. Once the match team is picked (including substitutes) you select the playing positions, individual's methods of play and the teams tactics as a whole. It is these tactic-specification screens which introduce the many variable factors that make Tracksuit Manager much more strategic and tactical than other management games. Match details are displayed in a blow-by-blow manner, similar to a real-life football commentary, the highlights scrolling up the screen with the pitch shown underneath - the current area of play is highlighted by a red bar. At half-time, player and team tactics can be changed and substitutes brought On if necessary.

The WATCH option is similar to SCOUT except the manager watches a chosen match in its entirety and it can prove more informative than scout reports. CUP brings up the fixtures calendar.

Using the DIARY option, you may not only list all the fixtures to be played over the next month but also set up a single or tour of 'friendly' matches designed to test the team's mettle. SAVE provides a tape storage facility (disk option is included on the Commodore version).

Tracksuit Manager is played through each month of each year, moving through the Nations Cup qualification rounds in October, onto the finals and the World Cup. Every month, newspaper reports appear detailing how you are coping and your team's performance so far. The game takes the traditional side of football management and expands on it without incorporating the financial side familiar to players of Football Manager 1 and 2. This omission has allowed the programmers to concentrate on the most important part of football management, the players, their tactics and the all-important matches. The resulting program leaves the rest standing due to its depth, scope and flexibility.