Sensible Soccer is widely accepted by both critics and public to be the greatest Amiga game of all time, possibly the best computer game of all time full stop. The Mega Drive version is effectively Version 1.2 (the Amiga original was followed by an improved update called Version 1.1), so it ought to be, well, practically flawless. But look at all the things that are wrong with it...

For a start, the sound's horrible. The in-game effects are accompanied by some reasonably well-rendered heavy metal-style guitar music, which is all very well and good, but switch the music off (either for aesthetic, heavy metal-hating reasons or because you're a bit of a footy-atmosphere purist) and you'll find it's actually being used to cover up some pretty unpleasant grating white noise where the Amiga's gorgeous geography-sensitive crowd chanting and cheers used to be. And the trademark tiny graphics, while they're done as well as you could possibly hope for, are simply asking too much of the Mega Drive. While reviewing the game, I was playing it at home on a 29-inch TV through the SCART socket, and I still couldn't read any of the text unless I sat a foot away from the screen, which with a 29-inch TV, quite frankly, does funny things to your head after about half an hour.

And on the subject of the text, it's a bit sad to see that for copyright reasons, all the team and player names have either been misspelled or changed to non-specific geographic names, so you get 'Elly McCuist' playing for Scotland, or 'Glaswegian' when you were expecting Celtic. (Although at least teams who are named directly after the city they come from, and are the only team in that city - like Aberdeen, say - escape unscathed, although all their players still have silly names). And finally on the 'presentation' theme comes my biggest problem with Mega Drive Sensible Soccer - there's no action replay. Well, there is, in that you get a single, full-speed, automatic replay of every goal, but the superb Amiga feature where you could get instant full-speed or slow-motion replays of any incident you liked at the touch of a button, and then watch all of your favourite ones in a 'highlights' sequence at the end of the match, has disappeared.

It's hard to see why, too - the SNES manages it, albeit without the slow-motion and highlights, from the same -pause' menu that the Mega Drive version has, and in the same amount of memory space, as far as I can tell. Action replays are half of a football game's heart for me, and the omission of this one is a sad, sad loss.

But hey, enough griping about such trivialities, what about the gameplay? Well, there's some funny stuff in here too, frankly. For a start, the game comes in three modes, Beginner, Normal and Expert, all of which have additions and differences to the Amiga game. In Beginner mode, it's much like the original, with the critical difference that the ball sticks to the feet of the players instead of having to be skilfully dribbled. There are some people who insist that this is the only way for a football game to be controlled (although I'm not one of them myself), so it's good to have the option included in Sensible, but why make it only for beginners? Why not have a ball-sticks-to-feet option, but one which could be played at any skill level?

And tying in with that, if you move up to Normal or Expert level, every team has three 'star players', who have special abilities which alter the way you have to play the game. The idea behind the star players concept is that instead of just charging straight for goal all the time, you have to try to manouevre play so that you get the ball to one of your star players, who'll have a much better chance of scoring a goal, or making a telling pass or whatever. As I've said, this makes for an interestingly different kind of game, so why not make it available in conjunction with the ball-sticks-to-feet Beginner game? You'd get twice as many permutations of play that way, for no extra coding.

The star players thing isn't without problems of its own, though. The special ability of a star striker is to be able to shoot powerfully directly at goal with a press of the 'A' button, without any of that tedious faffing around with aiming or getting in a good position or anything. Unfortunately, what this actually means in practice is that the star striker nearly always shoots at the centre of the goal, which is of course where the opposition goalkeeper is standing most of the time, even if the striker was in a position where a straight-line shot would have had a much better chance of going in. This, needless to say, is fantastically annoying, and leads to you actually going through all kinds of contortions trying to ensure that the final shot on goal falls to one of your non-star players so that you'll have some confidence in the shot going where you tell it to. 'Ordinary' players simply do an instant big huge punt when you press the 'A' button, and most of the time it's a far better option.

This kind of thing is especially galling because, for the rest of the time, the attention to detail in Sensible Soccer is amazing. From the every-option-covered way you can set up cup tournaments and leagues, to the comprehensive kit design options, to the battery-saveable edited teams and tournaments, to the convincingly different characteristics of the different types of pitch, to the astonishingly instinctive control method, to the accurate hair and skin colours of all the players, right down to the way that if you bring a substitute on in the last 20 minutes of a game, he's actually faster and stronger than the players who've been on the pitch since the kick-off, it's all there. For such obvious other chances to have been scorned is the biggest open-goal miss since Billy Bremner put one past the post from three yards for Scotland against Brazil in the 1974 World Cup. Together, all of these individually tiny flaws make Mega Drive Sensible Soccer the biggest disappointment of the year so far.

I'm joking, of course. All of the above flaws and omissions are indeed present in Mega Drive Sensible Soccer, and do you know what? It doesn't matter a jot. (Still, it made for a more interesting read, I hope you'll agree, than four pages of me gushing on about how I love it almost more than life itself. Which I do.) In gameplay terms it's astounding, easily the equal of the Amiga version and superior to it in several respects. In particular, the addition of the 'big kick' button adds a huge depth of variation to the tactical strategies available, enabling the player to switch between a fast-moving, close-passing style of play and a sudden, swift, Wimbledon-style punt-it-up-the-park-and-hope-for-the-best at will. The number of moves open to you at any one time has increased exponentially with the simple addition of one new control, and it's a stroke of genius.

Also, the Beginner mode with the ball sticking to the players' feet gives you almost a whole new game to play, with different advantages and disadvantages, so it's actually great for two experienced players as well as being a good way for beginners or the talentedly-challenged to get into the game (although it would still have been nice to have been able to play Beginner-style, but at the higher levels of computer opposition in one-player mode). The increased skill of the computer teams at the highest levels adds an element of challenge that'll be welcomed by veteran players of the game - try taking on AC Milan with FC Helsinki in THIS game and see how far you get. Oh, and as I write, EA's FIFA International Soccer has just turned up in the office (just too late to be reviewed properly), but as a one-player game and in pure gameplay terms this is way out in front of it, although in two-player mode, for different reasons,  there's very little to choose between the two. But back to the point.

It's surprising how much you'll tend to miss the replay feature, especially watching those extra-special goals or hotly-disputed penalty decisions in slow motion, and it's strangely unsatisfying playing Glasgow vs Glaswegian, for example, instead of Rangers vs Celtic (you can, of course, edit the teams to have the proper names yourself, but it's a bit of a pain in the bum without a keyboard), so a mark or two off at the end, but otherwise it's extraordinarily difficult to imagine how anyone could ask for much more from a video game than this. I adore it, and if Sega Zone think they're getting the cartridge back, they've got a surprise coming.

VERDICT

In two-player mode, easily the best Mega Drive game of all time. In one-player mode... almost certainly the best Mega Drive game of all time. Except for Gunstar Heroes, obviously. (You're fired. - Ed)

94%

There was only one thing for it. Faced with such a stunning product, I was going to have to find out more about the mysterious and secretive men behind Sensible Soccer. The evidence was sketchy, and details were thin on the ground - the only way I was going to get to the bottom of things was, paradoxically, to go straight to the top. I dialled the number that had been scrawled on the back of an Opal Fruits wrapper by my mole, a man known only as 'Penfold'. Actually, come to think of it, he wasn't a man at all, he actually WAS a mole. But anyway. The phone rang. An East Anglian voice answered. I chatted to it for a while until its owner arrived. He was Jon Hare, Orchestrating Director of Sensible Software. The stakes were high, the temperature low. It was now or never.

So, Jon. Did you always want to be a top games programmer?

Hello, Mr Campbell. I've got a really great Cannon Fodder demo here for your coverdisk. Wow, are you ever getting a great demo here - it's donkeytastic!

Ssshhh - don't mention the Amiga stuff, I'm not working for Amiga Power (which is Britain's greatest, best-selling and fastest-growing Amiga games magazine, incidentally. Thank you.) today. And also, I'm pretending not to know you to add an air of investigative mystique to the interview, okay?

Oh no, my men are dying. They're trying to get to their helicopter with heat-seeking missiles, but they have to swim across the river and while they're swimming across the enemy helicopter's dropping grenades on them and they're all getting blown up.

Look, shut up about Cannon Fodder a minute.

Alright. What do you want, then?

I'm exposing the myths and the mysteries behind the enigmatic Sensible Software for the readers of Sega Zone, and I'm starting off with a few deep and probing personal questions. So, did you always want to be a top games programmer?

Well, I suppose it all - hey, you must be pretty cheesed off at getting knocked out of the World Cup, eh? Poor old Bryan Gunn, I think the red mist must have just come down after the Scottish defence let that Swiss forward through. He just went sliding in with both feet and chopped the guy down, and it was all over.

Mm. Did you know this is the first time since I've been alive that Scotland haven't qualified for the World Cup? I don't know what everyone's going to do for comedy relief in 1994 now, especially since - hang on, you've got me off the subject again.

Hey, do you want to do the special Sensible quiz that we've put on your coverdisk? Let's do the Sensible quiz. Right, I've clicked on the gravestone and the first question's come up.

Oh no.

Right, there's a picture of the Sensible team standing in a field at our recent pop video shoot. One of the team members, however, is obscured by a Donald Duck mask. Which one is it?

Er, er, oh God, I reckon it must be...Jools?

Wow! Absolutely correct! One out of one! Next question - here's a picture of Stoo Cambridge. What's his favourite three-letter word?

War? Git? Bum? Hat? Cow?

You're not going to get it, are you? It's 'sad', of course.

Of course. Stupid of me. But anyway, about top programming, specifically of the already-legendary Sensible Soccer...

I've clicked on the picture of me now. What's my favourite football team? Come on, you must know this one.

(Sigh) Norwich City. Tim's going to string me up for this, y'know.

Two out of three! You're back in the hunt now. Right, Chris Yates, designer of Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder - what's his favourite war?

World War 1, surely? That's everybody's favourite. If I do this entire quiz, will you talk to me about programming and stuff?

Only if you get more than five out of 10.

Well, it must be three out of four so far, yeah? Do your worst.

Richard Joseph, Sensible soundman. When's his birthday?

You git. Um, um...Christmas Day, er, 1955.

Nah, you're at least two years out, I can't give you that one.

I demand a steward's inquiry.

Stop complaining, you've still got a chance. That's three out of five. Now I'm looking at a picture of the Sensible team in a field. What well-known 80s pop group are we impersonating?

How the hell am I supposed to know? I can't see the picture! Hang on, though, I know what you're like. You're called Sensible, so I reckon you're bound to be impersonating... Madness?

Wow! Four out of six! What did Chris Chapman do on Cannon Fodder?

I'm saying nothing.

That's right as well! He didn't do anything! You've got five out of seven now, one more and you've won.

Be still, my beating heart.

Right, we're all standing behind some kind of vehicle in this pic. What kind of vehicle is it?

Must be a tank, surely.

No, it's a half-track. And don't call me -

Don't even think about it or I'll kill you.

There's no need to be like that, y'know. Here's a sad and lonely gravestone commemorating the member of the Sensible team who's Missing In Action and not in these photos. Who is it?

Um, um... Stoo - no, we've had him... Richard - no, er... oh, it's no use. I can't think of any more members of Sensible Software. I give up.

It's David Korn, of course! Blimey, call yourself a journalist. It's all on this last question now. The last picture is of Julian Jameson, programmer and designer. What's his nickname?

What am I, stupid or something? It's Jools.

Aw. Six out of ten. Am I going to have to tell you stuff about programming and all that now?

Too right you are, matey boy. And after making me plough through all that, you're not going to get off lightly, either. I'm going to make you sit there for hours telling me about your entire life history, your first steps in programming, a detailed breakdown of the source code of every single game you ever wrote, what inspired you to do Sensible Soccer, all the precise differences between all the different versions and the reasons why you did them, your favourite kind of breakfast cereal, your mother's maiden name, where you went on your holidays this year and if your wife's a terrible cook or not.

You can't.

Why not?

You've run out of space.

You (Snip! - Ed)