[{"TitleName":"The Soccer Squad","Publisher":"Gremlin Graphics Software Ltd","Author":"","YearOfRelease":"1989","ZxDbId":"0012081","Reviews":[{"Issue":{"Name":"Your Sinclair Issue 44, Aug 1989","Price":"£1.6","ReleaseDate":"1989-07-17","Editor":"Matt Bielby","TotalPages":92,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":"Editor: Matt Bielby\r\nArt Editor: Catherine Higgs\r\nDeputy Editor: Jackie Ryan\r\nProduction Editor: Andy Ide\r\nSenior Staff Writer: Duncan MacDonald\r\nDesigner: Catherine Peters\r\nEditorial Assistant: David Wilson\r\nTechnical Consultant: David McCandless\r\nContributors: Marcus Berkmann, Jonathan Davies, Mike Gerrard, Sean Kelly, Peter Shaw,Phil South\r\nAdvertisement Manager: Alison Morton\r\nAdvertisement Executive: Stephen Bloy\r\nAdvertisement Director: Alistair Ramsay\r\nProduction Manager: Judith Middleton\r\nAdvertisement Production: Claire Baker\r\nMarketing Manager: Bryan Denyer\r\nCirculation Manager: June Smith\r\nAssociate Publisher: Teresa Maughan\r\nFinance Director: Colin Crawford\r\nManaging Director: Stephen England\r\nChairman: Felix Dennis\r\n\r\nPublished by Dennis Publishing Ltd, [redacted] Company registered in England.\r\nTypesetters: Carlinpoint [redacted]\r\nReproduction: Graphic Ideas, London\r\nPrinted By: Riverside Press [redacted]\r\nDistribution: Seymour Press [redacted]\r\n\r\nAll material in Your Sinclair ©1989 Felden Productions, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of the publishers. Your Sinclair is a monthly publication."},"MainText":"Gremlin\r\n£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk\r\nReviewer: Matt Bielby\r\n\r\nBlimey! Where's Marcus? This is the sort of thing he should be doing. Oi! Marcus, come here!... Ahem. Dr Berkmann seems to have decided he's sick of footie games and done a runner. You'll regret this, you scamp!\r\n\r\nAh, well, Gremlins Soccer Squad. It's done a fair number of footie games over the years, hasn't it, Spec-chums? They're not a brilliant, but at least this compilation gives us four quite different ones so there's little danger of repetition. So, let's kick off (ahem) with...\r\n\r\nROY OF THE ROVERS\r\nWeird, this one. I'd even venture well weird. The story seems to have been cobbled up more along Viz lines than those of Roy's own strip (oo-er). Get this - the Melchester Rovers ground is due to be bulldozed and turned into a multistorey pet food emporium or somesuch, and Roy's organised a celebrity five-a-side match to save it. But yikes! Roy's team has been kidnapped and our hero has to rush around the place rescuing his buddies in time for the five o'clock kick off.\r\n\r\nIn other words there are two games here, the first being a sort of adventure where you run around the streets of Melchester looking for clues as to where your team has been hidden. The computer flips the screen around 90° every time you turn a corner (so you're always walking horizontally across it), and you can pick up objects or talk to people you meet using option windows pulled from the top of the screen. The puzzles are pretty tricky though and since you've got a time limit it looks like you'll have to play the second half of the match with only one player. Lumme!\r\n\r\nAs for the footie bit itself, it's a sort of inferior Match Day II, but with trickier controls and teams that are almost impossible to tell apart. Still, once you get good at the first bit and manage to find one or even two other players you might be in with a chance. Not the greatest footie sim, but it's quite fun the way the two parts hang together.\r\nVerdict: 71°\r\n\r\nFOOTBALLER OF THE YEAR\r\nAnother weird twist on the soccer game. In this one you play a rookie fourth division striker, hoping to work your way up the league and through various teams to be nominated Footballer Of The Year. You have a wedge of money and must buy Goal Cards (which give you a chance to score when you play them) or Incident Cards (which give you random bonuses like Chance Cards in Monopoly) as well as play the game. Graphically quite nice, but it's a bit dodgy the way the league positions of teams bear little resemblance to the number of games they appear to have won or lost. Nicely programmed, but a bit lacking in the playability department for my money.\r\nVerdict 66°\r\n\r\nGARY LINEKER'S SUPERSKILLS\r\nA totally different ball game (ho-ho). This one's all training, comprising weights, press-ups, squat thrusts and the like. It's a multiload, so you've time to rest from the monkey bars (that really crap thing they have on army assault courses where they make you hang from a ladder upside down) before moving onto the ball skills. There's juggling, dribbling and shooting to get right, and a fair amount of joystick waggling involved to build your power up. Like Daley Thompson in Ocean's Olympic Challenge you get to cheat a bit by taking glucose tablets. And that's it really. Not all that much to do with football at all, but quite a fun gym sim all the same.\r\nVerdict 65°\r\n\r\nGARY LINEKER'S SUPERSTAR SOCCER\r\nAnother of Gremlin's management-game-cum-footie-action packages, this one features a nightmarish pic of our Gazza on the loading screen. In fact, it's probably inferior to Footballer Of The Year in that, even though it's got more to it, what's there is less polished. The first half is all trading and training players as you build up a squad of ten, (possible recruits are graded in terms of age and skill) and then it's onto the match itself which actually uses only six players. It's jerkier than Match Day II, harder to control and generally less fun all round. You choose the joystick control of either the centre forward or goalie, while the computer looks after the rest of the team. Choose to control the coach as well and you can pick from a menu of attacking or defensive tactics. It's all perfectly playable, but falls between two stools, being neither a full-blown management game or an arcade game.\r\n\r\nAnd there we have it. Gremlin certainly like its football, but does football like it? This is quite a fun compilation for soccer fans but, to be honest, the point of the actual game seems to have eluded the programmers a bit. Most of these attempt to combine management strategy and arcade soccer in some way and aren't that brilliant either. Wouldn't you be better buying Match Day II for the action and Football Manager for the strategy and tossing the idea of combining the two down the dumper for bad ideas where it belongs? (Clue - yes you would.)","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"Quite a fun soccer simulation, but no real standout games. For fans only.","Page":"61","Denied":false,"Award":"Not Awarded","Reviewers":[{"Name":"Matt Bielby","Score":"67","ScoreSuffix":"%"}],"ScreenshotText":[],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":[{"Header":"Life Expectancy","Score":"61%","Text":""},{"Header":"Graphics","Score":"66%","Text":""},{"Header":"Instant Appeal","Score":"68%","Text":""},{"Header":"Addictiveness","Score":"63%","Text":""},{"Header":"Overall","Score":"67%","Text":""}],"CompilationReviewScores":[{"Header":"Roy of the Rovers","Score":"71%","Text":"Roy of the Rovers"},{"Header":"Footballer of the Year","Score":"66%","Text":"Footballer of the Year"},{"Header":"Gary Lineker's Superskills","Score":"65%","Text":"Gary Lineker's Superskills"},{"Header":"Gary Lineker's Superstar Soccer","Score":"62%","Text":"Gary Lineker's Superstar Soccer"}]},{"Issue":{"Name":"Sinclair User Issue 91, Oct 1989","Price":"£1.6","ReleaseDate":"1989-09-18","Editor":"Jim Douglas","TotalPages":100,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":"Meet the super hard-working SU team!\r\n\r\nJIM \"Editor\" DOUGLAS\r\nAs Sinclair User;s pioneer of New Technolog,. Jim is completely at home with thousansd of pounds worth of high quality laser equipment. On top of deciding what goes where in the mag, Jim can explain to the simplest of simpletons the pica/point conversion system on a Mac hard drive DTP 123 system. And not once has he sat and stared and sworn at a blank screen for a whole afternoon. Not many.\r\n\r\nALISON \"Production Editor\" SKEAT\r\nAl loves her PC to PIECES (arf). With its special ergonomic vertical keyboard and - rather expensive - blank-o-screen Alison's Cray XMP Wysiwig can spell check, delete lines, write extra copy and even sample the current text and suggest a witty headline. Never again will you find a typographical error in Sinclair User. For example, the Cray has written the next piece.\r\nXyndfi31 \"f hthecat\" I:LK\r\nSJ:Jmnr23jouo >54t,6 > . 6tgv nonsytemdiskretryerror .....\r\n\r\nTIM \"Art Editor\" NOONAN\r\n'Nah. Vis new tech's a load of donkey's bums' muses Mr Philosophy. Tim has always preferred the traditional way of doing things. Descended from 11th century monks. Tim continues to keep some of their practices alive in his design work. Every letter that appears in all of the 120,000 issues printed each month is carefully printed onto each page by Tim using an ivory stencil. Here Tim can be seen working on his 53,000th \"E\". As you can see, it's fascinating work.\r\n\r\nGARTH \"Staff Writer\" Sumpter\r\nA hard man to track down, staffer Garth managed to elude the camera's eye once more. You see, if he's not writing something at his desk, he's looking at a new game, and if he's not looking at a new game he's trying to get hold of a new game, and if he's not trying to get hold of a new game then he's driving thousands of miles to research some information on a new game that may be coming out. And if he's not doing any of that, he's probably completing his work for the CIA. Alright for some eh?\r\n\r\nAdventure: The Sorceress\r\nDirty Tricks: Jon Riglar\r\nHow The Hell: Andrew Hewson\r\nI've Got This Problem: Rupert Goodwins\r\nExtra Stuff: John \"Payments overdue\" Cook, Chris \"Payments very overdue\" Jenkins\r\nAdvertisement Manager: Nigel \"Two jobs?\" Taylor\r\nAdvertisement Executive: Martha 'Is he not?' Moloughney\r\nAd Production: Emma Ward\r\nMarketing Manager: Dean 'Jiggy jiggy' Barrett\r\nMarketing Assistant: Sarah 'Where's my film?' Ewing\r\nPublisher: Terry 'The big man' Pratt\r\n\r\nOur Address: [redacted]\r\nOur Phone Number: [redacted]\r\nOur Fax No: [redacted]\r\n\r\nThis Month's Cover: Cabal from Ocean\r\nCover Artist: Jerry Paris\r\n\r\nPrinted by Nene River Press, [redacted]\r\nTypeset by Professional Reprographics Services [redacted]\r\nDistributed by EMAP Frontline.\r\n\r\nSubscription Enquiries: [redacted]\r\n24 Hour Order Line: [redacted]\r\nBack Issues: Back Issues Department (SU), [redacted]\r\n\r\n©Copyright 1989 Sinclair User ISSN No 0262-5458"},"MainText":"Label: Gremlin\r\nAuthor: Various\r\nPrice: £9.99\r\nMemory: 48K/128K\r\nJoystick: various\r\nReviewer: Chris Jenkins\r\n\r\nYou're really going to have to be a football fanatic to survive through this package.\r\n\r\nThis is a compilation of four old Gremlin titles, Footballer of the Year, SuperStar Soccer, SuperSkills and Roy of the Rovers. Two of the are tied in with Gary Lineker, so his ugly mug stares out from the packaging of SuperSkills and SuperStar Soccer; Footballer of the Year is a sort of strategy game and Roy of the Rovers is a weird mix of adventure and simulation.\r\n\r\nThe package comes on two cassettes in a library case, and the instructions are all boiled down onto one difficult-to-read sheet.\r\n\r\nFootballer of the Year is an icon-driven simulation in which you start out as a spotty 17-year-old apprentice with £5,000 in the bank, and have to make your way through the sport until you're voted Footballer of the Year.\r\n\r\nBy selecting different icons you can access your team's status/player status; play a match, where an arcade sequence gives you the chance to score penalties; transfer to another team, save or load a game, and, the most interesting bit, pick a random incident Card which can be anything from a free goal to a fine for spitting.\r\n\r\nSuperSkills is a bit like Daley Thompson's Push-ups, or whatever it was called, because it's more to do with doing your exercises than with actually playing football. Lots of joystick-waggling fun as you practise pushups, ball juggling (Fner!), dribbling (on the pitch, not down your chin), and finally shooting through tyres. Not bad, but a bit futile if what you really want is a soccer game, try SuperStar Soccer, which has all the facilities of a management simulation - trading players, training, setting leagues - but which also has a nifty match simulation which can played at normal speed or up to ten times normal.\r\n\r\nLast in the list is the strange Roy of the Rovers (not that Roy himself is strange, you understand). This is an arcade-adventure in which the Manchester team are kidnapped the eve of the big match - shock horror! Using a menu system you can make Roy walk, run, pick up and drop objects, smile or fight. What he can't do, like most footballers, is walk and talk at the same time, hee hee.\r\n\r\nIt's all rather clever and ends with a decent five-a-side simulation, so in many ways Roy is the best of the bunch, top of the league, big banana or whatever they call themselves these days.\r\n\r\nOdd that this collection doesn't actually feature a full-scale, no-nonsense, whack-it-in-the-back-of-the-net match simulation, but this lot should keep any soccer fan over the moon for many a season.","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"Football feast will burst your laces with excitement.","Page":"44,45","Denied":false,"Award":"Not Awarded","Reviewers":[{"Name":"Chris Jenkins","Score":"77","ScoreSuffix":"%"}],"ScreenshotText":[],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":[{"Header":"Graphics","Score":"68%","Text":""},{"Header":"Sound","Score":"58%","Text":""},{"Header":"Playability","Score":"68%","Text":""},{"Header":"Lastability","Score":"89%","Text":""},{"Header":"Overall","Score":"77%","Text":""}],"CompilationReviewScores":[]}]}]