"One is battered to the ground and then raised on angel's wings to the highest heights," wrote Gustav Mahler of his second symphony. Sensible Software must have felt a similar sense of awe as they put the finishing touches to Sensible Soccer, which, quite simply, is the best Amiga game ever.

"One is battered to the ground and then raised on angel's wings to the highest heights," wrote Gustav Mahler of his second symphony. Sensible Software must have felt a similar sense of awe as they put the finishing touches to Sensible Soccer, which, quite simply, is the best Amiga game ever.

Why this should be the case isn't immediately obvious, however. Sensible Soccer is just one of a vast number of Amiga football games, many of which are very good indeed. But Sensible Soccer is more than just "very good ineed". And it is more than "very, very good indeed" too. In fact, even if you took the words "good indeed" and kept putting very in front of them until you were blue in the face (and wondering quite where this was leading), you still wouldn't have come close to descibing just how good Sensible Soccer is.

It starts off by being a really good, solid football game. All the rules are in there, there are millions of teams to choose from, you can do substitutions and everything... all the sort of stuff you'd find in any self-respecting football game. But then Sensible Soccer starts pulling ahead of the rest. The controls are responsive and ituitive, and after a while you can forget they're there, leaving you to immerse yourself in the actual tactics and things. And speaking of tactics, (um) there are lots of them in it. You don't just charge towards the goal and hope for the best - you've got to look for people to pass to, and find ways to fool the goalkeeper, giving the whole thing a real, proper, footbally feel.

But there's something else about it, something that's a bit harder to pinpoint. Sensible Soccer runs a bit faster than your average football game (though not as impossibly fast as Kick Off, which you won't find in the APATTOH this year) and, without neglecting it's football roots, it manages to incorporate the fun of a simple arcade game aswell. You'll also find that, while in one player mode the game is so good it's a struggle to find a superlative to describe it, in two player mode it hopelessly exceeds the bounds of the English language. Suffice to say that it reflects the skills of the participants perfectly, so good players will tend to win a lot ( which more than anything else, is where the Kick Off games fail desperately), and crap ones will have to keep practising. It's the most compulsive two player game money can buy. It's wonderful. We hardly feel worthy.

Oh, er... and now an admission. You know earlier we said that Sensible Soccer is "the best Amiga game ever"? Well, it's not. There's a game that's actually better than...Aw you guessed it. (Had you going for a bit though, eh?) Sensible Soccer 92/93 takes everything that makes the original so staggeringly marvellous and tweaks it, adding red a nd yellow cards, improving the goalkeepers and making it all a bit more difficult. Incredibly, it's even better still. The best Amiga game ever, in fact.