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Gaz Lineker turns up again in a Gremlin product, surprise, surprise, this time in "the most realistic football game ever produced for your computer". Hem hem. I'll be the judge of that. To my way of thinking you can't turn over too much control to the human player in a computer soccer match, as the player won't be able to control the team and just lose all the time, which is very distressing. The way it *ought* to be done is like Ocean's Match Day II by Jon Ritman, which was to give the team a certain amount of artificial intelligence, and let them help the human player to know what's going on.

Okay, so the sample we reviewed was on the Spectrum, so the fact that the game slows down every time anything moves is to be expected. But even bearing that in mind, I found the game tiresome and fiddly. Playing on the keyboard was impossible, some mix up with the move and quit keys, and so I had to reboot the game and use a Kempston joystick. You can have two players (one keys/one stick) playing at once, which is nice but it's a bit of a tight squeeze. You can initially select controls and inspect the standings of the league. Although it's not explained as such, it seems to be the World Cup, as all the other teams in the league are Brazil, Poland, Germany, etc rather than domestic clubs. The games are then played, and the league standings judged to find the league winner.

The game is seen from above in plan view, so the player sprites are just little heads with legs poking out of the top and bottom. Each player has a little dot next to him when he is under the control of your joystick/keys. One of the good features of the game is that the goalies are automatic and track the ball, attempting a save when the detect a shot coming in. The ball grows bigger when it's kicked to give a sense of depth to the view. The controls are sluggish and the compute runs rings around your team. The odds are better against a human player, but again the speed of the game lets it down. It's hard to pin down what's duff about Gary Lineker's Hot Shot! but it lacks something special, that little extra oomph that separates the good from the so-so.

If you enjoy getting pasted at football, Gary Lineker's Hot Shot! is the one for you (You little masochist, you!). Really, nothing special.