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I don't know but I've been told Hotshots boots are made of gold

Wish it were true, in fact my goal total is one from four this season and I've got to hold my hand up and say I spewed a few. Nevertheless, I reckon my tally, combined with my silky skills [You mean your dressmaking prowess? - Ed] and my regular visits to Upton Park, make me well equipped to review Gremlin's game.

A new strategy football game was a good idea. Football Manager was excellent in its time but it's a bit dated now. Gremlin's effort turns the Addictive game on its head and allows you to play it from the footballer's point of view, or to be more precise, the striker's point of view, because the whole scenario revolves around you sticking them away. Goalies and defenders don't get a look in. This is the first of many discrepancies in this program.

Stop chanting obscenities and let me explain. You start as a goal-hungry seventeen year old in the Fourth Division with a dream of becoming the PFA Footballer of the Year. Load up the game and choose a team (you can edit in your own one so I went for Red Star CU) and type in your name. You are now a player in the league.

From here the screen throws up an options page, with seven symbols. The globe shows statistical facts such as your position, goal tally, and record; the footballer's head gives you personal information such as your status rating and earnings; the scroll allows you to buy transfer cards (expensive!); the tape is a save game option; the injured footballer (looks like a dead wasp) a quit game option, the question mark a kind of chance card; the football bool a play matches option.

You begin, as I said, with five grand, but you also have ten goalcards. This is the first, and hence the root, of the game's problems.

Goalcards allow you to enter the arcade shootout option and score goals. Without them you can't score; if you can't score, your rating goes down and the team invariably loses. No Footballer Of The Year award for you, just another lousy season in the lousy fourth division on lousy wages.

So how do you get goalcards? Well, like everything else under dis guvrnment you have to pay for them. The ten you start off with don't last you very long, so you need to keep buying more. The higher the division you're in, the more expensive they get. Your only hope is to accrue enough money to keep buying them. This is difficult because they far outstrip your meagre wages. So you're left to rely on the chance or incident cards. As the name suggests, sometimes you gain (a pools dividend) and sometimes you lose (you seem to keep getting your chequebook nicked!). It costs you £200 every time you want an incident to happen on top of that, and occasionally it tells you 'No incident happened this time'. You're still £200 light so that makes you go and kick the cat.

This really spoils the game. I can understand that any program is going to comprise a random number system with various values having various repercussions, but to make it all money-based seems stupid.

Once you run out of the goaldust goalcards, you just keep hitting the Fire button in the hope you'll amass enough wages for a chance card (invariably when you're down you get kicked in the teeth with an injury). Your only other hope of improving your career prospects is being transferred. This means dosh in your pocket, and dosh means goals and goals mean increased status. I was transferred one season from Red Star CU to Fulham in the Third only to be transferred seven games later because a talent scout from the Fourth wanted a good player. Do you know where I ended up? Red Star. Sick as the proverbial parrot, I was.

If this review sounds as if it's going in circles that's because the game does. The cutting blows of fate that determine whether you have any money in this game for those blasted goalcards make the whole thing too much of a lottery. There's not enough strategy in it to hold your attention.

The only part I haven't mentioned is the arcade sequence that allows you to take penalties or shoot before a defender closes you down. This is diverting and some skill is involved, but it's not enough.

In all, the game is nicely polished but fundamentally lacking in the appeal that football has, and can have, even on a home computer. I suspect this is because the programmers barely understand the basics of football. The boys didn't do great.