The Gaffer wurde für Linux auf Steam veröffentlicht.

Das Spiel ist eine Fußball-Manager-Simulation im 8-Bit-Look, in der du ab 1959 bis zu 30 Jahre lang die Karriere eines Trainers in der englischen Football League lenkst. Der Preis liegt bei 10,25 €, zum Start gibt es bis zum 6. November 10 % Rabatt (9,22 €).

THE GAFFER starts you at the gates in August 1959, in Division Four, with a chairman willing to take a chance on you and a town that hasn’t decided yet if you’re any good. From there it’s yours: up to thirty years in the dugout, one manager, one long career at one club or several, told as it happens rather than looped forever.

All 92 Football League clubs are placed in real English and Welsh towns rather than placeholders, each with its own researched local history, and the real national headlines of the day run alongside your career as it unfolds. Below them wait twelve non-League clubs, playing a season of their own every year and hoping for a place in the League. Every club has its own squad, its own books and a manager with a career of his own, hired, sacked and poached away as results go.

The whole League moves by the real rules of its day. Two up and two down at the top until 1973, three after. Until 1986 the bottom four of the Fourth Division have to ask the League’s annual meeting to re-elect them, and a club that asks once too often can be voted out, yours included. From 1987 the bottom club drops to the Conference. The play-offs arrive in 1986–87, and if you finish in them you play the ties yourself.

The rules of the day are the rules of the game. No substitutes until 1965, and then only for an injury. Goal average until 1976. Two points for a win until 1981. No sponsor’s name on a shirt until 1979. The winters bite too: games are postponed, fixtures pile up, and the Big Freeze of 1962–63 wipes out weeks of football.

Build a squad the honest way. Sign, sell and negotiate against 91 other League clubs after the same talent, or grow your own through a working Academy where prospects develop, break through or wash out. Team talks, live match commentary and a post-match replay put you inside the ninety minutes.

It all runs on your own machine: nothing is sent anywhere, no internet connection is needed to play, and it asks for no more than a dual-core processor and 8 GB of RAM.

Quelle: Steam