And the clouds parted, and a choir came forth and sang: "First there was Sensible Soccer. And now there is..."

And the clouds parted, and a choir came forth and sang:
"First there was Sensible Soccer. And now there is..."

Swimming always troubled me. Up till the age of
eight, I couldn't do it at all, and every afternoon had to flounder
about in the shallow end with children much younger than me,
and the chlorine stinging my eyes. I tried to do it, I really
did, and did just what the posters said around the walls. But
while everyone else floated, I just seemed to sink. My arm bands
were getting tighter every year, and the nose clip had long
since atopped preventing the icy water from filling my nostrils.
And afterwards, when the rest of the class had gone home, I'd
sit in the changing rooms and weep, the tears trickling down
my legs and into the drain on the floor. Until, finally at the
age of eleven, I managed it. I had to hold on to the side a
bit while the teacher wasn't looking, and afterwards be pulled
from the water, exhausted, but I finally managed to swim from
one end of the pool to the other. Now I swim 50 lengths before
breakfast every morning, but the day I lined up in front of
the whole school, oblivious to the way I towered above the children
next to me, and received my one length swimming certificate
from the headmaster was one of the proudest moments in my life.
And this is the other one.

GREEN

I stand before you today, noble readers of AMIGA
POWER, holding a copy of Sensible World Of Soccer, the greatest
computer game ever created. It is, basically Sensible Soccer-
which still reigns supreme at the top of both the AMIGA POWER
all time top 100 and the AMIGA POWER readers all time top 100
- only with management options that open up whole new vistas
of oppurtunities. (Er am I rising to the occasion okay here?)

Now we've written far too many reviews of Sensible
Soccer to go through it all again from the beginning. So if
you're in need of a recap, the original review of Sensible Soccer
(AP 15) wasn't too bad, if a little short, and there was a one
page review of Sensible Soccer 92/93 in AP 21 which'll bring
you up to date on the current state of play. Oh, except for
International Sensible Soccer, but we didn't bother doing that
because they 'd just put a referee in and that was about it.
So think of International Sensible Soccer with a small rotating
'S' and the time at the top of the screen (if you're playing
on an A1200), a stadium around the edges of the pitch (which
actually improves the atmosphere immensely), a stats screen
after each match with details of possession and so on, the players
each having individual strengths and weaknesses (more of which
later), the tactics altering the way the game feels slightly
(more on that later too) and there being a bit more control
over tackles and headers (in fact there's some more on all of
this later), and that's the football playing side of SWOS. It's
still great, and by a long way the best football game on the
Amiga.

Then - and this is the biggie - there's all the
management stuff which has been heaped on top. Regular readers
may realise that I am not the most avid devourer of football
management games. So I've enlisted the help of Paul and Steve,
who relish football management games and who, through me, will
explain how SWOS fits into the general football management scheme
of things. Is it just an ordinary football game tarted up with
a rather more extensive-than-usual set of front-end menus? Or
is it, by neatly straddling the management and arcade football
genres, about to turn the games world on it's head, devastating
entire continents with rivers of molten lava as it crushes the
likes of Premier Manager 3 and Tactical manager with one hand
and Football Glory and Goal with the other?

Well...that might be going a bit far. SWOS has
lot's of management style options, but it doesn't go wuite into
the detail of a dedicated football management game. It doesn't
have the financial jiggery pokery of Tactical Manager - you
don't get the oppurtunity to count up gate receipts, or improve
your stadium. You have to worry about major stuff like transfer
fees, obviously, but even then it's done in a rather clinical
method, with little oppurtunity of picking up a bargain through
careful bartering and there's none of the human element that
makes On the Ball World Cup Edition so succesful, with it's
eschewing stats in favour of players' girlfriends and your own
home life.

Instead, SWOS gives you an extraordinarily detailed,
intense level of control over match tactics. More so, even than
Premier Manager 3, the virtues of which Steve was extolling
a few pages ago. For example, as well as instructing an individual
player to move out of position when a ball moves to certain
areas of the pitch (12 areas in PM3, 35 in SWOS), you can go
on to specify the direction the player should run if the ball
is then kicked from that spot to another. So you could have
overlapping fullbacks in a 4-4-2 who couls run round a midfield
winger withe the ball and provide him with another passing option,
just as in real life. (The only thing you won't be able to do
is engineer an offside trap - Sensible have always excluded
the off-side rule from their games, disapproving of it on the
grounds that it's a bit silly)

GRASS

In a way, by looking at the options available
in SWOS, you can begin to understand why Sensi was such a good
game to begin with. All this stuff has always been intrinsic
to the way Sensi players behave, explaining why the game feels
so much like real football. It's just that now you get the chance
to fine-tune it all for yourself, and watch the results in action.

And then you've got a simply staggering array
of teams to amuse yourself with. SWOS infact, includes about
1500 teams from around the world, encompassing over 26,000 players
and Sensible have typed in the stats for every single one of
them. And they tell us everything was up to date as of approximately
15 minutes before the game went off to be duplicated - even
for the really obscure foreign teams.

All the teams are arranged into their own leagues
and cups - 146 in all, ranging from the FA Cup, to the Taiwanese
Premier league. And of course, you have the option to customise
the teams in any way you see fit, and devise your own competitions.
Phew. The first thing Sensi veterans will probably notice once
they;ve ploughed through all the menus and got a maych started
is that the players don't respond to the ball as readily as
they used to . There's nothing wrong here -it's because you
really need to play around with the tactics editor before your
player will start to move around properly (at least we think
so, although Sensible claim you shouldn;t notice any difference)
but it does make the game a little less accessible.

You'll appreciate the time being on the screen
all the time , and possibly be slightly irritated by the spinning
'S'. The stadium's good, as are the new crowd chants, which
vary depending on where in the world you're playing. I can't
honestly say I noticed the new way that tackles and headers
work until it was pointed out to me (now if you tap the fire
button lightly as you go in for a tackle or header, you can
nudge the ball gently, rather than booting it for miles), but
the facility is there if you want it.

But nowm as you're playing, you can think: "Hmm.
I could do with my defenders coming forward a bit more when
the ball's up the other end." And then you can actually
go into the tactics editor and sort it out. This is undoubtedy
a Good Thing.

Alternatively you might be approaching SWOS as
a seasoned football management games player. And you might be
a bit sceptical about the omission of things like gate reciepts
and stadium improvements. Our Steve, for example, is a committed
On The Ball fan, precisely because it goea into so much detail
into things like that. He enjoys keeping tabs on his players'
love lives (in a strictly professional sense) and getting home
to find his wifes left him because he's been spending too much
time at work. he alse likes all the badly drawn pictures of
men in sheepskin coats. Steve is the sort of person SWOS will
find it hardest to appeal to. However, Steve thinks SWOS is
the greatest game he's ever played.

Paul, on the other hand plays Championship Manager
'93. He laps up it's reams of facts and figures, and doesn;t
miss the plot stuff or silly pictures one bit. Paul also thinks
SWOS is the best game he's ever played. Although it helps, of
course that he also likes Sensible Soccer a lot.

The brilliant thing about SWOS if you're playing
it from a management point of view is that, once you've picked
your squad, sorted out their formation and fiddled about with
the tactics, you can then sit back and watch the results unfold
before your eyes in the form of the best football game on the
Amiga. It's stacks better than a textual match commentary or
even Premier Manager 3's graphical display, the sole drawback
being that you don't know what the players, who aren't around
the ball are doing because you can only see a small portion
of the pitch on the screen. And you can interrupt the match
to give th players new instructions base on the tactics which
you came up with before the match, and make substitutions, and
make substitutions and everything. And of course if you're a
player/manager, you'll be able to join in the game aswell.

The Ultimate way of playing SWOS would be to follow
through an entire career as player manager which throws up some
quite terrifying theoretical figures. A career lasts 20 years,
and if you're really good and get through to the finals and
everything, you can expect to play a maximum of 70 games a season.
At a minimum game length of three minutes, plus a couple of
minutes per game on the menus, that's a total playing time of
, er (3+2)*70*20 = 7000 minutes, or 117 hours, or nearly five
days, playing day and night without even stopping to go to the
toilet or anything. Blimey. Your career will be further enlivened
by an achievement screen which updates on your progress, and
the possibility of being offered an international management
job, if you do really well.

While there'll always be room for quirky rivals
like Empire Soccer on the one hand and On the Ball on the other,
Sensible World Of Soccer does, basically destroy all of it's
rivals in an explosion of apocalyptic dimensions, like that
bit in Star Wars where the Death Star blows up Princess Leia's
home planet. No matter how many football games you've already
bought, this is better than all of them.

Uppers

The latest version of Sensible Soccer built in.
A massive database of facts and figures. The most precise control
over tactics imaginable. Seamless integration between the playing
and management sides

Downers

It hasn't got any of the plot stuff that Steve
likes

The bottom line

The best Amiga game ever.

95%