Sensible World of Soccer

It's over a year ago that we ran a Blueprint on Sensible World Of Soccer. Just think how much has happened in the world in the interim: our glorious Prime Minister resigned for a few days: the French decided to redesign the gene pool in the South Pacific: and Gary Neville mysteriously became a better player than Rob Jones; while the sweeping tide of mighty world events ebbed and flowed, while old people in local newspapers 'fell asleep' and were replaced by 'little ones', while all our lives were enriched no end by the coming of the TV adaptation of Pride And Prejudice, the finest minds at Sensible Software were busily working, working, working, on the pc version of their finest creation.

And now it's here, and it's exactly the sodding same as the Amiga version. Well, all right... they've added some animated cut scenes. Obviously, we'd much rather they spent time and money doing this than expending any effort on improving the game, and they've made a very wise decision. And the matches haw 'commentary' - a collection of intermittently bellowed cliches that do nothing for the game whatsoever. All the latest major football releases, both arcade and management, have featured commentary by famous commentators that adds something to the atmosphere. Sensible has done it on the cheap, and badly.

But other than that, it's the same game: there's a player-manager career option, with teams from virtually every league in the world. Unfortunately you can only play it in single player mode. In multiplayer mode, all the previous versions' competitions are back, with European Championships. World Cups, etc. and customisable leagues and cups which allow you to combine teams from anywhere in the world.

Big deal. There are three main problems with the game: the good teams are far too fast, it looks crap nowadays and the management side is token, to say the least. You can design formations and trade players, but it's hardly Championship Manager. We can forget the once-cherished idea of the perfect combination of management and arcade game. It'll never work. And Sensible Soccer itself has had its day. This is a one-year-old game, which was surviving on its gameplay even then. It's been superseded.