As Dylan Thomas put it - football. A game played by gentlemen with odd-shaped studs. Or was it a game played by studs with 44 balls? No, a ball shaped by 22... Anyway, James Leach investigates four slightly related items

Liverpool. The word itself conjures up visions of a city in the north of England by a big river with lots of Scousers and vaguely amusing sitcom-folk. And football, too.

In this game you control the players as they move around the pitch after the errant ball. The sprites are bigger than most games of this sort, but there's a price to pay; the game isn't quite as fast as it should be.

Control is a problem, too. Keeping possession is fine until you try and nearly wrong-foot an opponent, whereupon the ball is delivered to him on a plate, and he rushes off. Of course, practising makes this less of a hassle, but it still doesn't feel quite right.

Each player's name pops up when they are on the ball, so at least you feel that Liverpool are playing, rather than just any other team who have chosen to wear red that afternoon. The pitch is viewed from an oblique up-the-pitch sort of angle, which is all fine and dandy until the ball goes behind one of the largish sprites in a crowded goal-mouth.

The action is pretty frenetic although it's not incredibly smooth, and the large players are interesting to look at since they do their utmost to be in the most awkward position possible, and try to thwart you at every turn.

There are plenty of on-pitch features which improve the game as well, such as red and yellow cards, headers and penalty shoot-outs, and you have the chance to play in a full season as well as go for the FA Cup. Unfortunately no European matches are included, but perhaps this would have been asking a bit much.

Liverpool just doesn't compare with the likes of Kick Off, Sensible Soccer or Striker, but it's not bad and has a grip on reality, owing to the fact that you're using real players. It's tough, too. You do have to persevere with the practice matches to get a feel for the game (you could just leap in, but you get completely slaughtered for the first few games).

So it's not bad. Trouble is, if you're not especially keen on Liverpool, you'd be better off with any of the other football games, which do play better.

Overall 74%

Dr. Fox? Wasn't he the guy who could talk to the animals? Didn't he go around the world in 80 days? Or maybe he invented a time machine?

No. Dr. Fox is the proud author of this program which enables you to analyse the performance of any or all of the league football teams. Why? To win a fortune on the pools, obviously.

Someone has typed in a vast amount of data which can be called onto the screen in any form you wish. For example, if you want to see how Bristol Rovers stood in the First Division on any given date, you can call up the correct table. How many away goals they scored? No problem: simply click on the right menu. All the matches played by all the teams, down to the Diadora Football League or even the Beazer Homes or HFS Loans League are here.

So it's a powerful database. What you can also do is harness it using the Analyse option. This gives a statistical rundown of any team. Fixtures which have yet to be played can have their results predicted relative to past form.

You might be a doubting Thomas who believes that this system can't possibly work. Fair enough - the irrepressible Dr has thought of that, too. His program even enables you to compare results (which you have to input) with the forecasts it made, so you can see whether it's actually any good.

If you get Dr. Fox's 1992 Football Annual, you're going to have to input a fair bit of data yourself every week in order to keep it up-to-date. This has been made as easy as possible, but it's still rather a bind.

The conclusion must be that only true fans (or those who are absolutely desperate to win some dosh from Littlewoods) are likely to find it in them to tap away inputting data every Saturday evening instead of going out and drinking too much or even just getting a pizza and watching a video. If you need results, though, you can send off your disk to Dr. Fox with an SAE and two first class stamps and he promises to get a modified version back to you by return of post. all this on top of his 80 hour hospital week, too. The whole thing runs off the GEM interface, making it easy to use and pretty quick, too. It's not much to look at, but what it does it does well, and the data is fun to play with. As for winning the pools... well, it can't predict any worse than a human, can it?

Overall 70%

Now, here's a management game with a difference; you can only manage Leeds United. Fine if you're a fan of them, then, but what about Bristol Rovers, eh? They're in dire need of a manager at the moment.

Anyway, consider, if you will, a Leeds United languishing at the bottom of the league. They desire, as should you, to be at the top (where in reality they are, give or take a place or two). It's up to you to get them there.

Your first move is to make sure Gordon Strachan never, gets injured. Once he goes down it's time to wave hello to the Toby Gibbonposture Sunday Morning Crap League. Once you've managed to stave off that fright, it's time to train the men then sit back with a glass of hot toddy to watch the match.

Ah. Bit of a problem here because for the duration of the match, you tend to see a rather uninspiring picture of the tunnel at Elland Road. The attacking, defending and blatant falling-over-howling that goes on is only hinted at with a few words at the top of the screen. And even then the finer points of the melodramatic screaming and tumbling are glossed over. so what it comes down to is another management game which, though it's done well, has nothing new to offer. About the only thing which this game has and many others don't is the chance to nick promising players out of your Youth team. You don't get to interfere with the Youth team (good thing really, because you'd be locked up) but it pays to keep an eye of the lads because occasionally a decent player turns up, forcing you to child-nap him before he's eighteen and forced to leave the minor side.

Once more, everything is icon-driven and you can fiddle with the positions of your team, as well as training them and trying to control their tempers. Temper is a rating given to each player, and must be taken into account before giving them responsibility on the pitch or letting them near night-clubs. You can also increase the stands at your ground, charge what you like for tickets and generally try and extort money from punters and foreign businessmen. Actually, that was a lie.

Leeds United Champions! suffers greatly from having an exclamation mark after its name. Apart from this, it's a sound management game with less-than-stunning on-pitch action. Mouse-controlled once again, it's as good as most, better than some and worse than a few. OK?

Overall 61%

Not only do you get to play football here, but you also get to manage your team. Perfect if you enjoy snatching the glory from others on pain of being sacked. The idea is to set up your side so it can't possibly lose, then go in and score all the goals yourself.

Most of the usual management options are here; you can buy and sell players, train them, swap them, set up your position - anything you like, really. Then when you're happy (or bored with doing all this) you can go and have a match. Sensible Soccer it isn't. The graphics are big and there's a lot going on, but as far as controlling a player goes, well, you're limited to clicking with the mouse when an indicator points towards the goal. This does make a difference to the run of play, but it isn't very satisfying and there isn't a vast amount of skill involved. Leaving aside the "arcade sequences" the management bits are pretty good. You use the mouse, clicking on icons and highlighting things you want done. It runs quickly and any mouse-related cock-ups you might make are easily rectified.

One apparently unique feature is the ability to get your scouts to search for people of particular skill elvels. By simply typing the skill rating of the person you feel is missing from your side, you can get all the available players with that skill rating listed.

There is a disk option too, so you can save and load to your heart's content. It's a small point, but you still see management games occasionally which don't have this option.

Striker Manager is a bit of a misnomer; you don't get an awful lot of control over your boy on the field, but for the first few matches it's worth using the option before turning it off and concentrating solely on the management side which is competent and as good as anyone else's. The only thing wrong with this game is that it's far too expensive and comes in an unnecessarily big box.

Overall 58%