Load soccer-gaming software and you'll be assaulted by sharp graphics, great sound and cinematic intros that sweep across stadiums, past gleaming goal posts and under players' boots - all to a trendy soundtrack provided by the likes of Robbie Williams or the Ministry of Sound. Oh, and the soccer is quite realistic too: From sliding tackles to ecstatic victory dances around the corner flags, there's enough detail there to keep you absorbed. All of these games are highly configurable, allowing you to take your teams through seasons, competitions, indeed entire life times. Some programs are more about managing a team than playing a game. For instance, the first decision you have to make in UBI Soft Entertainment's Football World Manager 2000 is to choose an ethnic group, hairstyle and cheekbone structure for your manager.

After that, the playing seems almost secondary. My favorite feature of the latest games is "live" commentary from well-known television personalities such as John Motson. He's been around for more than a quarter-century, and to hear him offering remarks on Electronic Arts' FIFA 2000 about your team's play is heartwarming and disconcerting at the same time. Motson sometimes appears particularly dismissive of my efforts, especially when the goal-keeper decides, for no fathomable reason, to put the ball in his own goal."Let's watch that one again," he says, before running a slow-motion replay of the incident, "although it won't look any prettier second time around." The cheek. Touches like that do make playing these games a lot more than just arcade-style amusement.

Take your players on a training session in Microsoft's International Football 2000, for example, and you can hear all the sounds of an out-of-the-way training pitch, including planes flying overhead, an ice-cream van passing and the sound of a leather ball hitting the back of the netting. (A word to Rage Software, the British company that wrote the software: The soccer ball sounds kind of flat when it bounces. Any chance of blowing some air into the next release?). Electronic Arts' EA Sports appears to have the edge over other games, with the FIFA series, which soon will be available in a fancier 2001 version. The players are realistic enough for you to see their teeth when they celebrate a goal (not necessarily a desirable feature, I grant you), and you can see the goalkeeper's look of disappointment when a ball gets past.

In that respect, EA Sports is slightly ahead of Microsoft's International Football, whose players' faces for the most part look like boxes with painted-on features. But players' movement in both games is largely impressive, illustrating the great strides made in a technology called motion capture, in which sensors are attached to a human player and then translated into computer graphics.

Drawbacks of these games? Well, to make them sing, you really need a game pad - a panel of buttons that you can attach to the gaming port on your computer - and you need a fair bit of time to master the various controls. Basically, you're in charge of whatever player on your team is closest to the ball, and the computer will pretty much handle the rest. I must confess to mastering none of the games I reviewed. I found international football particularly baffling, when, more often than not, my designated player would wander off the field, apparently in search of some liquid refreshment. You can imagine what Motson would have to say about that.