It's time for the last part of Nostalgiarama, in which I take a slightly sarcastic - but wholly affectionate - peek at another football management game that captured my heart. This week, it's the turn of Premier Manager 98, a Gremlin product taking the brave step of being the first attempt to make a realistic simulation for the Playstation. Did it work? Well, let's see shall we?

The first thing to emphasise is just how bold an effort this was. The console might have kicked everyone's game-playing butt for a while back there, but no way was it the ideal platform for a management epic. Let's fact it, the PSX (or PSOne as it is now known) is another home-based alternative to being down the amusements. Its biggest achievement was to make the plea for "Got a spare ten pee mister" redundant, as it smoothly recreated arcade games for your living room pleasure. In this sense, the Sony grey box had little problem in making a success of Mortal Kombat, and the smooth action of the Tomb Raider series was a lovely thing to be part of. But the database-heavy forum of world football? This was a challenge, and one that came off only semi-successfully.

After baulking at the price ("'Ow much mate? Forty quid?") and also at the fact that you had to have an entirely free memory card to hand ("Eh? Fifteen blocks?") your first disappointment came at the very start of your PM98 experience. A disembodied voice (think it was Keegs, or maybe Big Ron) said "I want you to go out there and not lose one match", before segueing into a looping mix of Sweet Harmony by The Beloved, which then went on forever, much like the song itself. Further audible fun came from the ugly bleeps emitted whenever you pressed something, but this is just griping. More on the 'sound' side of the game a bit later.

Unlike in the previous (PC-based) versions of Premier Manager I had owned you could choose to manage any English league team you wanted. Each possessed real-life players, and had a budget according to its status. For a greater challenge, you went for a 'Career', which then offered you the choice of ten Third Division teams with aims you had to meet. Once you were installed, you could do things like modify the focus of your staff to decide how much priority you wished to give to health, youth development and coaching. There was the obligatory tactical decisions, in which you plumped for a long ball game, short passing, and so forth, and chose from a series of formations. This was good. If you decided to emphasise an attacking approach, a pitch with 11 balls representing your players appeared with the forward orbs throbbing as though they'd just received a good kicking.

Each player had a series of characteristics with scores out of 100, but to simplify your dilemma over who to select, your men would be given a star rating also. This doesn't mean Chris from CM Star showed up to assess whether you played Seaman or Manninger, rather that someone with five stars would be world class, whilst a one-star fella should be considered up for eviction. This rule of thumb was so easy that in the end, you could save time by ignoring the numbers and concentrate on your stars instead.

Onto my favourite part of any management game, the transfer market, and here you were allowed to make an offer for any player at all. However, unless he was listed or available on a Bosman, you would have to be prepared to offer the shirt off your back to get any response apart from a flat refusal. In most cases you would make offers for the former group, who appeared on a separate transfer market screen awaiting your bid. No one ever gave a good reason for getting shot of his world class stars; it would simply transpire that on one of your many visits, who should be there but George Weah, like the last issue of Superman 1 in a geeky comic store. Because of this, over time you were able to build a side of god-like superstars, and there was always some crazy fool knocking around to pick up your dross. More often than not, that fool was called Peter Reid. See where the realism kicks in? And just in case you're curious, you could construct an entire squad of the divine if you so desired. Elements like morale and dissatisfaction over being left on the bench were not issues, so you could rotate your squad to your heart's content, always selecting on a 'fittest players get picked' basis.

An almost surreal element to the game was its ageing process, in that you could choose not to let your players get any older. The consequences of this facet should be obvious to all. Strangely even if you did allow ageing to occur, the next product of the youth system to appear in your squad would be eerily identical to the lad who had just retired. What was PM98 trying to tell us? As in Championship Manager, you had a limit to the size of your squad, but you didn't actually know what this limit was. The way you usually found out you had reached your quota was when you successfully bid for a player, only to find that instead of joining your club he had vanished into some sort of limbo for spare leg footballers. Weird.

Matches in PM98 followed roughly the usual course, with bars telling you where the ball was whilst a clock ticked down and statistical counts clocked up shots, crosses, etc. There was something strangely compelling about this, but the real fun was to be had if you instead opted to watch the match highlights. Here, you entered a 3D match engine, replete with Barry Davies commentary, crowd noises and damn decent graphics for the time. The attention to detail was the clincher here. Players who you knew were black in real life would be so here.

Shadows moved along with their owners, and Davies was much more on the money with his quips than he could ever manage on ITV. The only downside was the game's rather limited stock of action scenarios, which suggested that fluke long-range shots were on target more often than even Roberto Carlos would manage.

On the whole PM98 was addictive enough for me to stick with it for a short time, despite the charms of Lara Croft waiting on my spare memory card. All the competitions were there, even the European ones, though in anticipation of Super Leaguery, the game compressed the Champions League and UEFA Cup into one continental trophy. The same European teams always qualified for this contest also, which was a shame as only their players were represented so you had a very finite limit of footballers to choose from. Where, for instance, was Gabriel Batistuta, someone you would expect to find in any management simulation? Sadly he couldn't make it as he plied his trade at Fiorentina and they weren't in the top echelon of Italian soccer.

To say this game wore thin after a while is to understate dangerously. How long could you really go on with the same team (if you decided to resign, that was it, game over) for year after year? A record of your past achievements wasn't available as any memory of previous seasons was wiped out at the start of the next, meaning that there was no such thing as player histories, nor any count of reputation. What there was though, came across quite well. The class of the players was reflected reasonably well (despite Luc Nilis being amongst the game's best strikers, and Jari Litmanen outclassing Zinedine Zidane) and there was little wrong with Actua Soccer's match engine. What knackered it was that as well worked as the in-game action was, so much was lacking in depth and detail. SI Games showed that you didn't need to put all your efforts into pretty graphics to put out an amazing product, but then of course they were working for the PC. Ultimately, the Playstation was just the wrong place for this type of game, a fact that didn't stop Gremlin from producing a Premier Manager 99 with Kev Keegan on the box. A decent effort, then, but Lara's thrupenny bits were never in danger of losing.