Your Sinclair


Tracksuit Manager

Author: Jon Pillar
Publisher: Hi-Tec
Machine: Spectrum 48K/128K/+2/+3

 
Published in Your Sinclair #62

Track Suit Manager

If you know my feelings about management games, you'll realise that if I said "Tracksuit Manager is quite good," it'd be like Lord Lucan turning up as the killer in Twin Peaks (ie pretty unbelievable).

Tracksuit Manager is an absolute corker. It's a pure' management game (graphics? Wot graphics?) and it's got more comprehensive features than a month of Sunday's colour supplements. A full World Cup competition! Single fixtures or world tours! Teams that refuse to play friendlies if they think your side is crap! Scouting out opponents! Changing team or individual players' tactics! Losing to countries you've never heard of!... The list is characteristically endless. But the words any management fan really wants to hear are - it's menu driven, and (hurrah!) it's in machine code. While you plot your strategies through a system more friendly than a slightly drunk Glaswegain, your Speccy manages the rest of the world in, ooh about five seconds. (No more gently-chugging Basic pauses - bliss!)

And the icing on the cake is the running commentary, as you anxiously follow the results of all your plans. It's paced just right to have you gnawing the table with tension as the (real-time) match unfolds before you in admirable detail (and in my case yet again ending in losing to Albania). There's even a deliberate pause before you find out if your team's shot at goal has succeeded - sheer sadism! (You can speed all this up though if you want to.)

It may not be everyone's cup of tea (hence my overall mark) but if you're even vaguely a fan then do rush out and buy this. It's worthy of the highest accolade from the Management Master himself - the Kevin Toms 'Beardy'. (And I can't state it clearer than that.)

Jon Pillar

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