PLAYER MANAGER 2 EXTRA REVIEW - February 1995
| Football. Like it? Me too. But indulge
me in a thought for a moment. What's the worst thing about football? Not secondary elements like the gentrification of the audience, bribery and corruption, or the fact that your team's crap - the actual game itself. Let's face it - it's offside. The crappest, cowardliest, most negative and most pointless rule in the game. I mean, what's the point of it? Presumably, the idea is to stop a team gaining an advantage by constantly having a player hanging around the opposition goalmouth, waiting to latch on to big ugly hoofs upfield and stick them in the net. But why is that an advantage? For a start, if you've got a player constantly goal-hanging, you're going to be a man short in the rest of the pitch. Secondly, if you do it anyway, what's to stop the defence negating the whole plan by simply having a defender stay back to mark the goal-hanger at all times? Being offside grants you no unfair advantage whatsoever. So why do we need a stupid rule about it that does nothing except encourage tedious sides to thwart attacking play on a ludicrous technicality? One of the reasons why football is the best game in the world is the utter simplicity of the rules - it's all obvious, straightforward, common sense. You can grasp the idea in seconds - kick the ball into the net, don't use your arms, don't kick the other players. That's it. Other sports are welcome to crap, unnatural rules invented because of obvious flaws in the basic premise of the game (the six-tackles rule in rugby league, the truly appalling 30-second rule in basketball), but football doesn't need them, because it was properly designed in the first place. Offside is the only anachronism, and the sooner it's done away with, the better. Guess what the pivotal force in Player Manager 2 Extra is. Go on. Offside. (Drums roll, cymbals crash, crowd cheers.) Whether you're playing in matches yourself or just watching them as manager, the game will be interrupted every 10 seconds for an offside foul. There are a couple of reasons for this - one is that computer-controlled forwards take up ridiculously offside positions as a matter of course, and the other is that the program simply doesn't understand the rule. If, while I'd been playing the game, I'd docked 1% for every time an offside was awarded with the defending team in possession of the ball, AP would have had to award it's first-ever negative score, and extend the Bottom Line box to encompass a few extra digits to boot. Even when the offside is given when the attacking team has the ball, it's usually given for an offside that happened five seconds earlier and 20 yards back. And that's not all. When the defence go to take the free kick, they invariably bring a player back to tap it straight to the player about to take the kick, and he invariably then fluffs it straight to the nearest opposition forward. Who charges unopposed straight at the goal, and frequently scores. So in fact, being given offside very often puts the attacking team in a better scoring position than they would have been if the game had just carried on. For Christ's sake. I'm harping on about this because, for one thing, it completely obliterates the point of playing Player Manager 2 Extra in player-manager mode. The game is so incessantly interrupted by stupidly wrong offsides that you'll give up in apopleptic frustration within two matches. It also destroys the point of watching managed matches, as the same happens only without you being involved in it. You can still watch the 'highlights' mode, or the misleadingly-named 'predict' mode (which, in fact, does no such thing, and is simply a truncated and pictureless version of 'highlights' mode), but you've already been deprived of several of the most interesting features of the game. And what of the actual management side itself? Well, Paul gave the original Player Manager 2 35% in issue 53, and very little has changed. There's still tons of disk accessing (expect to wait the best part of three minutes between one match ending and the next one starting, even if you skip every option possible), it still takes an age to see any effect from strategic changes you might make, everything's still described in endless charts of tiny, almost-impossible-to-read numbers (and if you're using a TV instead of a monitor, make that "actually-impossible-to-read"), and there's still nothing here that you can't find in half-a-dozen better footy manny games. Is that a foul, ref? I think so. |
OH! I THOUGHT IT WAS IN! At one point, I'd given up on fiddling with my training schedules and tactical planning, and was just robotically playing match after match. After a couple of weeks, I was summoned to the boardroom and threatened with the sack if I didn't start playing the game properly. I thought this was fabulous, and was about to award the game another 10% on the strength of it, but after flagrantly disregarding the board's demands and continuing to skip straight to match day for another 10 consecutive weeks, only to keep getting the same threat rather than actually being entertainingly sacked, I changed my mind. |
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| UPPERS The graphics are prettier still this time round, and the match highlights sequences look great. The tactics designer is still pretty snazzy. DOWNERS ...except you can't watch them, because if you do, every game becomes an offside-crippled 0-0 draw. It spends hours loading, and can't be installed on hard drive. The 'Player' part of the game is a farce, even if you allow for the constant offsides. THE BOTTOM LINE Almost all the successful footy manny games from the last 18 months are a better bet than this. Better luck third time, Anco. 32 PERCENT |
