Sensible Soccer Classic Review By Gary Storm

Recently, Kickstart (the Surrey Amiga User Group), hosted an Amiga fair, which Robert, Mick, David and myself raided. The highlight of the day for me, apart from all the bargains, was a Sensible Soccer competition. It had been a long time since I`d played Sensi, at least a year or two, but I didn`t do too badly :) Playing in the competition rekindled the Sensi fire.

Sensible Software have been responsible for a few Amiga classics, such as Cannon Fodder 1 & 2, Sensible Golf, and of course, Sensible Soccer. Sensi wasn`t the first football game on the Amiga to adopt the overhead view, or, as Mick puts it... "ants with a football". Microprose Soccer, and then Kick-Off, were the inspiration for the guys at Sensible to improve upon the genre. Kick-Off was admirable in it`s first two incarnations, with Dino Dini at the helm, and the kind of arguments that rage today between players of titles of similar natures, like Fifa 98 vs Actua Soccer 2 on the Playstation, or Command & Conquer and Dominion on the PC, raged then betwen the champions of Kick-Off and Sensible Soccer on the A500, in the early 90`s.

Kick-Off wasn`t as well implemented as Sensi in some areas, and was losing the war. It totally lost the plot, when Dino Dini left Anco, and the subsequent Kick-Off programmers made a real hash of the series. No-one could dispute Sensi Soccers football crown, especially when a huge management side to the game was added, including nearly all the leagues and players of the world. Thus was born Sensible World of Soccer.

There are plenty of cup competitions to choose from, but the real meat of the game is the Career. Pick the team you want to be the player/manager for, from all the teams in nearly all the leagues in the world. For example I`ve just started my first season at St.George, a New South Wales division team in Australia. Players worth average at about 45k. You can take the team on training if you want, to see their calibre, but as I`m too impatient, I just get them out on the pitch, and test them against the opposition.

Controlling the game is simplicity itself it`s all done by one fire button on your joystick. The longer you keep the button down for when you kick, the harder the kick is. Press it while you`re defending, and the player you control (indicated by his number appearing above his head) will do a sliding tackle. Decide the direction the ball will take if the tackle is successful, by pointing the joystick in that direction. One of the most rewarding things to master, is the aftertouch, whereby the ball you`ve just kicked, or passed, will bend in the direction (left or right) you hold your joystick. Simple, effective, fantastic. It will still take some time to get used to the system, as with all games, but it soon becomes second nature, and the feeling of scoring a goal from a difficult position, is amazing. Luckily the goalkeeper is controlled by the computer, so you still have someone to blame if it all goes horribly wrong in a match :)

After the match, if you`ve been observant and made note of the players you`re impressed/distressed by, you can enter the world of tactics, and transfers. All the players in SWOS have attributes relating to speed, control, finishing, tackling, etc, which influence the way your team plays, and therefore which players you buy and sell. As a general rule, the higher the price of a player, the better he is but not always. I tend to like a fast team, so I look for players with an "S" in their stats, although Andreas Thom is quite fast, and he has FHV has his main attributes (Finishing, Heading, Velocity), so it`s always good to keep an open mind when buying players. Put the players you don`t want on the transfer list (maximum of 5 at a time), and wait for any offers to roll in. You can haggle a bit if you get offers, but you could also lose the sales opportunity. You live & learn.

To build a good team, you`ll have to invest a fair amount of time in the search for good players on the transfer market, or trawl through the teams of the world to make direct offers on players not on the market. One of the great things about Sensi is that you can develop your own world-class players, through trial players, who become reserve players if you like them, and then go on to be worth more and more money if they perform well. So you`re not forced to always buy class players, even though it is the quickest way to success, if you have the finances.

Yes, you have to keep an eye on that side of things as well, as any good manager should. Money is earned from ticket sales at home games, cup games anywhere, and the selling of players for a profit. Just don`t be too much like Southampton and sell your best players :)

Hopefully, if you`ve done a good management job, and played a good game of football, you`ll get promoted to a higher league in that country at the end of the season. I`m aiming for the Australian first division with St.George. You may get job offers from other clubs (probably Tottenham :). If you stay with your current club, the chairman will allocate more money for the coming season, so you can strengthen the squad. If you didn`t do too well, you may get sacked.

Whatever your career moves, hopefully you`ll do well for quite a few seasons, and you may even get offered to manage a national team. I was manager of Australia for a while once, after doing great things at Kilmarnock and Celtic (Scotland). I thought I was doing quite well with the players I had, but was sacked after a season and a half. Bah humbug.

A brilliant inclusion in the game, believe it or not, are injuries to your players. This realism injection really makes the game even more of a challenge, as you have to consider many more things than normal. What if your star player get`s injured, possibly out for the rest of the season (a-la Newcastle)? If you don`t win the next few games, to stay in that division, you`ll be signing on at the dole queue. Yet you haven`t got a decent replacement, and no money to search for one. Eeeeeek! This game requires planning, people. Your substitute selection is just as important as your team selection, in this game, unlike the myriad of powerful, pretty console games of today, who never get injured players. SWOS still has more depth than any other football game in existence. Fact. That may change if Sensible Software do as good a job on the Playstation version they`re doing.

There aren't many things that SWOS needs in the playability stakes to make it even better. The only things I can think of is the anomaly that a player can be doing really well, and scoring plenty of goals, yet his value can go down sometimes. Not often, but it`s strange nonetheless. The other one is that the computer players don`t ever seem to get seriously injured, which puts you at a disadvantage, as your players do get injured enough to be forced off the team for a few matches at least. Hopefully someone can fix these two slight oversights in the programs code sometime.

Ahh, I hear you cry, wasn`t SWOS on two disks ? Who wants to have that old disk-swapping knee-slapping wrist-injuring hassle again ? Don`t worry, neither do I, and we don`t have to ! Thanks to some intrepid programmers, there are a few SWOS installers available, for all the versions. I recommend the SWOS `96/`97 update edition installer. Then you can download or grab the other SWOS updates to bring the team/players data into the present. There`s even a complete World Cup `98 data update, to give you English another chance (I can`t talk...Australia didn`t even make it to the finals.....but maybe Mr.Venables had something to do with that, and he`s English :). If even that isn`t up to date enough for you, there`s a SWOS team editor you can install, which let`s you play around with absolutely everything, including the player stats and value. Andy Cole really can be brilliant, after all :)

As with most games, human Vs. human is the best, and although the computer is a very (sometimes too much so) worthy opponent, it`s against your friends that the most fun is too be had. At the Kickstart competition, I was kicked out in the second semi-final, after a well fought match which was very close until extra time, where it ended up 4-2, to the eventual winner of the competition, James.

Do yourselves a favour.... buy SWOS, install it on your miggy HD, and have a great time trying to make your way up from the player/manager of a piddly little team, into the player/manager of a world cup winning national team. Good Luck !