Once again, you're aiming to win the title of Footballer of the Year by scoring as many goals as you can in a season. The main differences here are in the scoring of goals – you choose you many goal cards you want to use, and you have to select from 21 plans. After viewing the blackboard tactics, you have to recreate this on the pitch and score. There are no incident cards, though; instead, they're replaced by a 'double or nothing' game where you answer footballing questions. This also forms the basis of some transfer offers, and unless you're a bit of a buff about football, getting them right is a matter of guesswork. This game would be better than the original, but the appalling graphics let it down very badly.

See also: Footballer of the Year.

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4

Grimesditch Rangers, a small and struggling football club, has somehow beaten many of the best teams and reached the final of the FA Cup. As the manager, this is your moment of glory – but with three days to go until the final match, everything that can go wrong does. Bills need to be paid; the kit needs to be washed and Ma Wallis at the laundry won't do it; there won't be a coach available to take the players to the match; your star player quits the team... and so it goes on. This is actually a text adventure created using GAC, and apparently it sold quite well. Unfortunately, it's a nightmare to play, thanks to an extremely unforgiving parser that demands you type an exact combination of several words, yet won't accept more obvious combinations.

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4

This was the original football management game, and it was written a long time ago. You start in the 4th Division and must make your way towards the top of the 1st Division (remember, this was before the Premier League was formed!). There aren't that many options available, but you can buy and sell players and change the names of your team and players, as well as deciding which players to use. Although the match highlights are awful, they don't last too long. This game is certainly showing its age, though, and a lot of other football management games have been released since then.

See also: Football Manager 2, Football Manager 3, Football Manager World Cup Edition.

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5

This game is much better than the original. Once again, you're in the 4th Division and have to work your way to the top of the 1st Division. The range of options is similar, but you can also do some passing training. You can now select where your players will go on the pitch, as well as choosing substitutes. The presentation is quite impressive and the match highlights are really nice and enjoyable to watch, too, with some realistic crowd noises! In fact, this is probably the best football management game for the CPC.

See also: Football Manager, Football Manager 3, Football Manager World Cup Edition.

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8

Whereas Football Manager 2 is one of the best football management games on the CPC, its sequel is very disappointing. As ever, you can select any of 92 teams and are automatically thrown into the 4th Division with a team that consists of a bunch of ageing thirtysomethings. Although there is a greater range of options available and the statistics are more detailed (for instance, there are eight skill and fitness attributes for each player, and full league tables are available), it's such a bore to play. The entire game is very slow and cumbersome, and the match highlights seem to last an eternity – and why do you usually get two or three players in your team with the same surname?

See also: Football Manager, Football Manager 2, Football Manager World Cup Edition.

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3

This was actually released after Football Manager 2, which may cause some confusion. You can take control of any of over 100 countries in their quest to win the World Cup. However, you don't really get to do much in the way of tactics; instead, you respond to questions asked to you by two commentators, which can affect the morale of your team. If you ask me, that's a silly way to play a football management game. The match highlights are all right, though.

See also: Football Manager, Football Manager 2, Football Manager 3.

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4

Forbidden Planet
(Design Design, 1986)

The Evil Lord wants you to collect several parts of a message that he has left on the Forbidden Planet. The planet is heavily guarded with laser defences which fire at you, and there are also many plasma tunnels (basically, hollow rectangles) through which you must pass, or your ship's energy will be depleted. There are also 'dislocations' which teleport you to another area of the planet. It's a 3D space shoot-'em-up which is very fast, but actually it's a truly awful game; steering the ship using the map is very inaccurate, and your energy depletes so fast that you don't stand a chance of surviving for more than five minutes. As Amstrad Action discovered, entering swear words into the high score table is more fun than playing the game itself.

See also: Dark Star.

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1

Princess Mara has been captured by the evil wizard Zarn, and you have been sent to the forest to rescue her. However, many foes lurk within the forest. This adventure game is actually a bit easy, although there are several confusing mazes, and the exits from each room aren't logical – for instance, you can go north at the start, but to get back to the starting room, you have to go west! The vocabulary is also rather limited, but this isn't too much of a problem, and the graphics, while reasonable, aren't quite up to the standard of Interceptor's other adventures.

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7

As you are sleeping, you dream about being on a forest path... then you wake, and find that you are now on that path. You've entered some sort of fantasy world – Forestland. This is a text adventure which uses most of the clichés that are to be found in any standard text adventure – dark places which require a torch, doors to unlock, treasure to be found, and a complex maze. Despite the plot, the adventure is little more than a treasure hunt, and although I seem to be criticising it very harshly, it's actually not too bad – at least, if you're a novice adventurer. The HELP command provides clues at appropriate places to help you. Experienced text adventure fans won't find it much of a challenge, though.

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6

The third and last of Charles Sharp's sports-themed GAC text adventures sees you at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, as the coach for the women's javelin team. For some reason, Britain's two best female javelin throwers, Fatima Sanderson and Tessa Whitbread, have been performing poorly since they arrived at the Hotel Olympus. Has their food been poisoned or drugged? Well, those Lithuatvians look suspicious, and you've got only three days to solve the mystery... Thankfully, this is a somewhat easier game to get to grips with than the other sports-themed text adventures which I mentioned earlier, although the parser is still limited and you will occasionally have to enter exact combinations of words to achieve the correct results, which is rather annoying.

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