Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm writing a feature on the best soccer games of all time, and need help with a title.

It was a soccer management game on the Amiga, which replaced the usual stats with colourful descriptions of what was going on in your players' lives. (Marriages, drinking heavily, suffering from depression, etc). From memory, it was one of the first footy manny games to do this. Possibly, it was made by the guys who did Bubble & Squeak, but I'm not sure.

I know Audiogenic's Super League Manager replaced stats with descriptions but I don't know if that's the one you're after?

I think you're thinking of On the Ball?

I think you're thinking that he thinks he's thinking of On the Ball?

I liked bubble and squeek.

I will kick anyone in the balls who says Football Manager 2 is any good.

Also, for me, Premier Manager was the biggest leap forward since the original Football Manager. It always gets overlooked in favour of Championship Manager but my mate and I were avid Football Manager players and loved Premier Manager on the Amiga.

I rather enjoyed Ultimate Soccer Manager on the Amiga, offering bungs/bribes and betting against your own team was a nice option, and building up the ground and surrounding area was also quite cool.

There was an awful one on the Mega Drive, but I can't remember the name of it, where a lot of your players would retire really young 'to run a pub in the country'

I seem to remember a friend of mine having a football management game ( possibly on the CPC ) where one of his star players retired to open a monkey sanctuary, or something daft like that.

I loved On The Ball but I hate football. The latter is probably why I was never any good at it. Or rather Lopink Bruhaha was not a very good manager. I seem to recall Premier Manager did away with stats in favour of descriptions of a player.

I used to play Multi-player Soccer Manager on the speccy quite a bit even though itw as horribly bugged.

You recall wrong, at least in regard to the first game.

Sensible Soccer
ISS
ISS Pro Evolution 2
PES 2
Championship Manager 01/02
Fifa 09
Monkey Football in Ape Escape 2

It was one reviewed in the later years of Amiga Power. I never played it so I don't know.

I didn't think Total Football on the Amiga was too bad. It was isometric, like early FIFA, but not unplayable crap like early FIFA.

Empire Soccer 94 is the most unfairly over-looked football game. It's like one of those Japanese footie arcade games, but far better, with some influence of Speedball 2.

Premier Manager was awesome, me and a friend at school used to trade the disc with our save file every day, play our match that night, then switch so the other could play the next night... and no, it didn't have any description type stuff, just the usual stats ratings for players out of 100 IIRC.

As Amiga Power said 'Speedball 2 in shorts'.

I hated it personally. I'm not much into football games anyway but this one I found frustrating.

Total Football scored pretty well in AP as I recall.

There's nothing that can compete with Sensi though for the actual football action.

I found the CD32 European Cup one to be the best. Just seemed to control better than other ones to me. But it could be my imagination.

I did love the old C64 Emlyn Hughes soccer game.

I remember being totally confused by it being a cartridge and not a tape.

I had that for the CPC. If you ran just past the halfway line and did away+kick for the big hoof it would always go in.

Yep, that's the one. Cheers.

I'm going to put Sensi at number one, even though half our readers have probably never heard of it.

And I had it for the spectrum, it was great. I liked the way you could do angled shots, but the forced perspective meant that if you did one from the top of the screen (so you were above the goal), the ball would just go across the face of goal.

Here's the finished piece, if anybody's interested.

The ISS Pro anecdote is a true story, incidentally.

Ultimate Soccer Manager on the Amiga was the only true management game I ever really liked.

I really rather enjoyed your article, brief as it was. This is a rare accolade that I bestow upon you so consider yourself proud.

Still you should really have included the N64 game World Cup 98 I think it was which seemed to have a dedicated foul button with no penalty for performing them.

Brutal Sports football isn't a 'soccer' game but that was rather good fun. There was on I enjoyed in the arcade quite a bit too. You got to choose your 'captain' not that I could tell any effect it might have. The only arcade football game I was ever any good at.

Oh and Soccer Brawl could possibly have got a mention.

Nah I guess not really. It's fine as it is.

Sensi very much deserves its place as the best footy game of all time.

good article, i hate this kind of flip layout of websites though..

is the cube version of mario strikers better than the wii one? did like the wii one


from pes, WE6FE (jap cube only) is the zenith of the classic pes games, translated many teams

and repsect for having roma score in the FM10 screenshot!