Soccer World Cup

While this game won't win any prizes for design, it does provide a good deal of enjoyment and may well make you feel nostalgic for those great days of the late 80s when the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum brought 8-bit goodness to the masses.

A number of national teams are included and you can take them World Cup glory in any tournament between 1986 and 2010. If you're still pining to see Bobby Robson's England side get past West Germany and lift the cup at Italia 90 or want to relive the last time Scotland qualified for the finals of the competition (France 98) then is the game for you.

You can also get your friends around and have tournament with up to four players or practice your skills in friendlies against the computer.

Visually, Soccer World Cup is not much to look at. Players are little more than three coloured dots that run up and down a striped green pitch. But if you ever played Sensible Soccer or World Cup Italia 90 back in the day, it's a format you'll be familiar with and enjoy.

Despite the simplicity of the graphics, this game is far from easy. Players move stiffly and finding the back of the net requires a good deal of work.

EA's FIFA or Konami's Pro Evolution this is not, but it is still a good way to spend a couple of hours, especially considering that its lack of graphics means it comes in a very small file size (just 11 mb) and uses very little of your computer's resources.

Setting up a game is incredibly easy. All you have to do is choose between 'World Cup Series' or 'Exhibition Match' in the main menu and select your team.

Standard half lengths are set to 15 minutes which is quite long, but you can reduce them to as little as two minutes in the settings menu if you wish.

All in all, there's a lot to like about Soccer World Cup. Once senses that today's youth will not make much of it, but if you're in your 30s or 40s, a few minutes on this will feel like a trip back to simpler times.

Pros

• Multiplayer mode
• Retro graphics
• All nations from 1986 to 2010 World Cups included

Cons

• Difficult to score and defend
• Won't appeal to everyone
• Players move oddly