At its heart, SWOS is Sensible Soccer Plus, but only in the same way that Doom is Wolfenstein 3D Plus. There is, quite literally, a whole world of soccer inside Sensible World Of Soccer, and it comes in the shape of a management game in addition to the award-winning arcade game of the original. SWOS features every known professional league in the world, with accurate and up-to-date listings for every single team and player in those leagues, right down to individual player skills and attributes. This mind-wounding encyclopaedia of data was compiled by Mike Hammond, one of the authors of the soccer bible, the Rothmans Yearbook, and is regularly updated to take account of transfers and suchlike, so you can be sure of the most on-the-ball info possible as you attempt to take Young Boys Of Berne to the Swiss Premier Division Championship.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. What's new here, exactly? Well, firstly and most superficially, the look of the game's been spruced up. The bare pitches of the original are now surrounded by gleaming new all-seater stadia, packed to the rafters with cheering fans. While purely a cosmetic addition, this simple touch adds to the atmosphere of the game hugely. We're still not exactly talking FIFA 96 in the visuals department, you'd be surprised how much effect this has while you're playing. Also on the cosmetic front, the whole presentation is much smarter now, right down to the Sky Sports-style stats screens you can bring up showing the number of fouls committed, corners won, shots on target and midfielders arrested for each side.

Where it all starts to really happen, though, is in the football itself. For one thing, you get the previously-mentioned database of real players with real skills. If, for example, you're playing as Manchester United and you flog Paul Ince to, say, Inter Milan and replace him with Nicky Butt, you'll notice a marked performance fall-off in the midfield libero position (a purely hypothetical example, of course - when the game comes out, Ince will already be an Inter player and you'll be scuppered). The game supports a full worldwide transfer market, though, so if things get too rough you'll be able to blow a few million quid and get the moaning maestro back again. But beware - in SWOS, as in real life, finances are limited by the stature of your chosen team (so good news for Blackburn Rovers fans), and if you pay over the odds for a player, his value will plummet to a more realistic level as soon as you've got his signature on the contract.

The second major change is where SWOS shows its real teeth. The game boasts what's almost certainly the most comprehensive and detailed tactics editor ever seen in a football game, including all the really dull dedicated text-only management ones. Firstly, you can set your side up to play any way you like, from simple slight alteration of the classic 4-4-2 formation to bold all-new styles like crowding all 10 outfield players around the ball in a circle and trying to simply trample it into the net. But you can also dictate every single player's individual positioning in every conceivable game situation. For example, if you notice that an attacking midfielder isn't pushing up far enough when you near your opponent's penalty area, you can, without affecting any of the rest of the side, instruct him to hover around the penalty spot and wait for crosses from your overlapping wingers, but leg it back to the centre circle the second the ball is cleared by the opposition defence.

The tactics editor is a lot of work, but it's capable of making the most dismal side from the Zaire Third Division play like Glasgow Rangers. If you're not careful. Powerful tools require disciplined minds. Sensible World Of Soccer will be released on the PC sometime in November. You should be excited.

SLOW TRAIN COMIN'

Disasters notwithstanding, PC SWOS will be on the streets in November. Don't smash your piggybank just yet, though - the Amiga version was delayed so many times, it ended up with an entire squad of abandoned release dates in the 'Custom Teams' section of the game. Here's an abridged timetable:

DECEMBER 1993 - this is clearly not on.

MARCH 1994 - someone wonders out loud if maybe Sensible oughtn't to start getting on with it. However, it's only 3 o'clock in the afternoon, so there's no-one else in the offices to hear him.

MAY 1994 - it didn't take anyone long to realise that releasing SWOS within days of the end of the season was a pretty silly idea. The fact that the game was only 20% complete at this stage was the final clincher.

JUNE 1994 - "Why not release it just before the World Cup?"

"Because it's still just Sensible Soccer with a different title screen."

AUGUST 1994 - the start of the 1994-95 season sounds like a good idea. Sadly, a colossal underestimation of the difficulty involved in collating accurate data for over 1,500 real-life football teams, often from obscure parts of Zambia or Ecuador, means that there's about as much chance of it happening as there is of Terry Hurlock not getting booked this season.

OCTOBER 1994 - this was still thought to be a probable date, right up to around the 30th of September 1994.

DECEMBER 1994 - after a particularly harrowing final stint in which programmer Chris Chapman didn't leave the Sensible offices for over a fortnight, snatching the occasional two hours' sleep on the floor, the game makes it out just in time for Christmas, where the team's toil is rewarded by the game selling over 100,000 copies and crashing straight into the charts at No.1, where it remains for the next five months.

JANUARY 1995 - the offices of Sensible and almost every Amiga magazine in the country are beseiged with letters and telephone calls complaining about bugs in the game which cause, amongst other things, players scoring over 60 goals in a season to still drop dramatically in value.

FEBRUARY 1995 - a tired and emotional Chris Chapman begins work on both a quick-fix patch disk to be given out on magazine coverdisks, and a full-featured update to be sent out free to all registered owners of the game.

MARCH 1995 - the patch disk appears on a games magazine coverdisk. Hordes of angry registration card-senders get the wrong end of the stick entirely, and complain about not getting the free disk first.

JULY 1995 - the updated, bug-corrected, actually-all-pretty-much-working-properly version of the Amiga game reaches the shelves and is sent out by an embarrassed Warners to the waiting punters who'd sent in their registration cards. Someone finds a small, insignificant technical bug. Chris Chapman, at the end of his tether, leaps out of a top-floor window in a suicide attempt foiled only by the fact that Saffron Walden, leafy village home of the Sensible Software HQ, has no buildings whatsoever more than two storeys tall.

AUGUST 1995 - work begins in earnest on the PC conversion.

TO BE CONTINUED...

SWOS isn't the first football game Sensible have turned their hands to, or indeed the first sports game. Over the seasons they've been responsible for various incarnations of the following:

INTERNATIONAL 3D TENNIS (C64, Amiga, ST)

An innovative vector-graphics tennis sim which still looks pretty striking today.

SENSIBLE OLYMPICS (never released)

Although aborted after just a few months' work, this multi-event joystick-waggler pioneered the little-men graphic style that would later be seen to dramatic effect in...

SENSIBLE SOCCER (PC, Amiga, ST, and pretty much everything else)

The big one. The best football game ever made - well, until now - and, on computer at least, the biggest selling. Over 300,000 copies (on floppy formats alone) and still going strong, this blend of instinctive, fluid, versatile, easy-to-grasp gameplay and tiny overhead-view graphics that let you see where everybody was provides the bedrock on which SWOS is built.

SENSIBLE GOLF (Amiga, PC)

Just released on the Amiga (where it debuted at No. 2 in the charts), this back-to-basics arcade golf game is due on PC very soon, where it should have an interesting battle against the more simulation-based likes of PGA Tour 486 et al.

SENSIBLE TRAINSPOTTER (Amiga only)

Sensible's Amiga swansong, this magazine coverdisk game saw the trademark Sensible touch being applied to the heady thrills of - what else? - trainspotting. Technically a sport? Who can say? But one thing's for sure - this is without a shadow of a doubt the best trainspotting sim ever released.

If you're familiar with the Amiga version of SWOS, you won't need much filling in on the background details. For the time-is-money types among you, then, here's an easy-to-digest no-mucking-around list of all the changes and additional features in the PC version.

- smartened-up 256-colour graphics and menus.

- enhanced and additional sound effects, which will hopefully mean there'll be more than just the one crowd chant this time around.

- glamorous and exciting intro, featuring a mix of Sensible sorts larking around on video and thrillingly dramatic rendered graphics.

- rendered reward sequences at significant moments throughout the game, such as getting a new job or reaching a cup final.

- the opportunity to manage or just watch each game individually, unlike the Amiga version where you had to decide at the beginning and then plough through your entire career.

- match commentary featuring either Jonathan Pearce of Capital Radio and Sky Sports fame or, depending on the outcome of certain complex legal wrangles, some bloke that RJ the sound programmer knows.

- and, of course, all the bugs and 'undocumented features' of the original version totally and completely fixed this time, honest.

And what of the future? Is this the last in a long and distinguished line of Sensible football games? Will Sensible quit while they're ahead (and while hard-working chief programmer Chris Chapman is still alive)? Jon Hare?

"Oh no. We plan to continually update Sensible World Of Soccer, much as we have done with the original game's Sensible Soccer 92/93 and International Sensible Soccer editions, in order to keep it current and competitive. The first major revamp is scheduled for next November, a year after release. Also, though, we've already started working on a very different-looking PC footy game in the popular and glam 3D style, which should hopefully combine the brilliant Sensi gameplay with the prettier graphics of FIFA 96 and all those sorts. It'll be great."

Don't get too excited, though - the new and as yet nameless game is scheduled for Christmas 1997 at the very earliest.