Tracksuit Manager

Overview

Tracksuit Manager, originally released in 1988 on a multitude of platforms, allowed players to take control of their favourite nation and hopefully take them on to win the European Championships and finally the World Cup. One of Tracksuits Managers' strong selling points was that for its time, it had an extremely detailed tactics system, allowing the user to go as far as giving a limited number of individual instructions to players.

Gameplay

Due to the game being set within International competition the game had no transfer system but instead started with a pool of 100 players to choose from for your chosen country. Unfortunately players choosing any country other than England were forced to enter in player details individually before they could proceed. From here players would choose a squad of 22 from which they would then choose their starting 11 and substitutions from. To help with selecting players a scout report could be supplied for each individual player giving the strength of a players passing or shooting, as well as their confidence level and stamina. Once a squad had been assembled the next step was to sort out tactics for the team. As noted earlier the level of tactical variety was detailed for its time allowing players to choose between different formations, attack-defence balance, attacking and defensive styles as well as what range of passing was preferred and how hard to tackle to opposition. These options could then also be configured for individual players, allowing you to play to certain players individual strength, for example if you had a midfielder with excellent passing, but the rest of your team was average at passing, you could set the team to play short passes whilst allowing your midfielder who was excellent at passing to hit long passes, reducing the chance of giving the ball away and also creating more opportunities.

Players were also able to arrange one off friendly matches or friendly tours giving you the opportunity to fine tune your playing squad and tactics.

Matchday

The match screen was again fairly detailed for its time of release. At the bottom of the screen it gave the player a small pitch indicating the current position of the ball, whilst the top half was a text box containing a description of the match action. To indicate who was in possession of the ball the team name would be highlighted. The description of the action gave the player a rough idea what was happening although obviously this was fairly limited to a few set phrases. Whenever a shot was attempted the text was highlighted  and there was a slight delay in giving the player the outcome of the shot, thus giving(or trying to give!) a feeling of suspense.