This is not an obvious place to go from Emlyn Hughes, but it is logical in terms of my own football game journey.
The Commodore 64 had hundreds of football games, literally hundreds. Most were bad, some were good and some were utterly atrocious. This fell into the latter category, a shameless attempt to sell an awful game using a player’s popularity.
For the record, it didn’t work on me. I didn’t buy it, one day a friend of mine used a double cassette deck to copy as many of his football games as he could. As was the case with the good ‘ol C64, only a couple would load, this being one. The other, for the record, was Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona.
Why pick this as the next game to feature in my list? Well, I am a sucker for facts and figures. I think it came from the Panini sticker books of old, but I loved passing stats, ratings and all of that. Gazza II, whilst being a steaming pile of crap in terms of games, had a section at the end where you got all the player ratings and stats from the game. Genuinely, I played this for a couple of weeks just to get the stats at the end of each game so I could write them down in a little notebook.
Most of the reviews of the day claimed that Gazza II was a great two-player experience, but woeful on one player and it was the latter which I endured. It was a bit of a hit on the ZX Spectrum though, the pace of the game impressing on a computer not known for graphics. At the time it came out, I used to get Commodore Format magazine, and they awarded it 38%. I thought that was generous.
What I do take away from Gazza II, and have seemingly taken away ever since, is my hunger for a sequel. At the time, my young mind thought that if the developers had crammed so many options in to a game, and a proper magazine had noted that, then surely they would read my mind and combine those features with the (at the time) scintillating gameplay of Emlyn Hughes. I’m sure I laid awake at night, dreaming of the combination, desperately scouring the pages of my magazine every month for news of the all-conquering Gazza III, with great gameplay and actual player ratings.
Sadly, it didn’t happen and although now rating are standard on football games, I don’t tend to put as much weight behind them as I do real stats, like xG. Mind you, I’m sure at times, xG is almost as random as the stats (and gameplay) on Gazza II.
Interestingly (depending on your geekiness), the issue of Commodore Format which reviewed Gazza II show it 14th in the sales charts that week, costing £10.99 (about £25 in today’s money), one place ahead of Emlyn Hughes. Criminal.
