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This is going to set all you manager sim fans out there shrieking, so hang onto your sheepskin jackets. I've never played a football manager game before in my life. Not ever. This is a bit of a mixed blessing from your point of view as a potential buyer of this game, and I'll tell you why. Not having played one before means that I can give a focused view of it as a piece of entertainment (which is, after all, what it's all supposed to be about), but the downside is that I can't compare this to other similar products. [Don't worry, sports lovers, the Amiga Power Football Management Fan Club will be watching over Cam's shoulder to make sure his lack of historical grounding doesn't cause him to make any embarrassing or 'unfortunate' mistakes - Ed]. Okay, here goes...

As a complete rookie to this sort of thing, what do I see? First off, it's pretty simple to use, with everything being controlled with the mouse, and all the different sections laid out in seemingly endless sets of sub-sections. You can click on a picture icon of a footballer, for instance, then choose from seven options, and still have other options to choose from. It's a game of 90 clicks, end to end, and no mistake.

Choosing my team, it becomes apparent that I'm expected to learn all the names of my team, plus any players on other sides that I might want to buy. Seeing as I ahve to refer to my parents as 'Mum' and 'Dad' because I still forget their Christian names, learning twenty or so fictional computer players is completely beyond me, so I've got to resort to good old pencil and paper.

There's loads of information on the form of each player and their medical records, but this only becomes important once you're well into the season. Until this happens, the majority of your time is taken up planning training, which simply involves choosing two activities from a list. Apparently you can work on the ball skills of individual players to boost them up, or use circuit training to get the entire squad fit, but it all seems a bit stupid to me. The same sort of thing happens in Speedball 2, but at least you've got some pretty pictures to look at.

When match day comes, you choose the team (more clicking) and have the option of watching the match, or any other amtch for that matter. It's an overhead non-intervention game and feels a bit like watching Sensible Soccer on demo mode, although you can substitute players if you want. Whoopee! [We should, of course, point out that this is a major advance on every other football management game in the world except the ancient Player Manager, though - Ed]

After the match, you can choose to congratulate, commiserate or go completely ballistic at your team, which is supposed to affect the team's morale, and then it's back to scouring the league for possible replacements, shuffling the team to take injuries into account and filling in dates in your diary.

And that's it. Do people really play these games for an entire year? It would appear so, seeing as they're constantly in the charts, but I'm pretty baffled as to why. I hated it from start to finish, and the lack of anything to look at other than graphs and lists made me suffer some sort of sensory deprivation attack. Strictly one for the train spotters, methinks.

One of the best football management games around, according to the rest of the team, but it left me completely cold, even when I thought of it as a wargame with the opposing team's penalty area as a kind of HQ to be infilitrated. That's the last time I criticise Stuart's music taste while he's allocating reviews. But anyway, although personally I'd rather say something like 8%, I'd better be objective and go for something more like...