Real Cricket Simulator.
By Koworld

Cricket is the world’s most stupid sport. It is mental beyond compare. The jargon, which changes from country-to-country, is archaic and is barking. The rules are changed every single year, the umpires often aren’t sure which set they are playing to and the range of countries involved is at best esoteric. One-day, 20twenty, Three-Day, Test, Four-Day – even the length of the match is inconsistent. The World’s foremost cricketing expert, and this is absolutely true, is a Canadian who has, get this, never seen a cricket match.

And despite all this, and of course because of all this, cricket is absolutely fucking glorious. It is the greatest sport in the world. Fuck the war-metaphor Football, fuck the brainless unsubtlety of tennis, fuck the stop-start of Rugby, and fuck all forms of American sport (the ‘Cricket Pitch’ in New York’s Central Park being the vestigial fin of a sport abandoned there in 1925 after some bauble-rattling showman managed to persuade the goggle-headed Americans that, French invented, Baseball was in fact the patriotic American game). All other sport is a hobby in this classification. Especially Golf.

Translating what is, essentially, a game about nuance and detail into an enjoyable videogame experience has always been challenging. Even now, here’s the best that amazon can do to describe, in a nutshell, the joys of Brian Lara’s Cricket (BLC) 2005:

See, by point four all they can come up with is ‘animated ducks’. Johnners would turn in his grave. And Aggers would provide the commentary.

Here’s where Codemasters get the world’s biggest ever cricket-lover’s sloppy kiss: yeah, sure, the game has got Hawk-Eye and Aussie-style ducks but more than anything, and beyond bullet-point undescribability the Codies team have filled BLC with subtlety and an understanding of the tiny degrees that make Cricket real. They have delivered a game of nuance and I’m absolutely over the moon about that.

This feels like Cricket. To bat you need to play yourself in, to position, time and place the ball. Bowling is all about confidence, line and length and is hard to do well. Variety of ball is a selection via button press but variety of shot appears to come from the subconscious but in an instinctive and consistent manner.

The Mighty Goosh.

We would really benefit here from one of those ‘Predicted Happiness Curve’ graphics because my experience with BLC has swung so dramatically. I absolutely love the game now but after playing on the easiest challenge setting (Village!) for an hour I was thinking about going down the shops and trading-in the bugger for a crack at EA’s Cricket 2005 instead.

Why?

The weird licensing for one: competitions are individually licensed, so for the World Cup you get the squads from the last WC (no Kevin Pietersen + Nasser Hussain as captain), then for the ICC Champions Trophy you get a more recent squad that includes Andres Strauss and Vikram Solanki (you can 'create' upto three new players if you want - these could by a Pietersen or Simon Jones if you're that fussed). The Test squads are unlicensed sham-a-likes and that's a shame (although you can laboriously edit them if you want to). Perhaps this shouldn’t be important but to real cricket nuts it is, because cricket pivots on individual performances – one person can make or break a contest with a single over or a single session with the bat: you need to connect with the individuals in order to feel you are really playing cricket.

Then there are early moments that break reality too obviously, especially on lower challenge settings, the otherwise excellent AI isn’t keen on the quick single and fielders only ever throw to the keeper's end.

And that’s why the experience starts on a low – like all sports games, you shred the manual and go straight into ‘Exhibition Match’ and the easiest challenge setting – in BLC this delivers you right into its weakest and least rewarding games experience: unlicensed sham squads playing slog cricket.

Get passed that and crack open a new tournament and the game becomes something very, very special indeed. All the right names, faces, kits and grounds can then be played on – albeit within the confines of the tournaments themselves. On ‘County’ or higher settings the game really starts to challenge you to find out it’s subtleties of line, timing and tactics.

Dreadful screenshot courtesy of Codemasters.

Codemasters have really thought about how Cricket matches themselves work in terms of ebb and flow. One example of that is that your bowler becomes easier to control as his confidence grows - his line and length become more consistent. When he's at the peak of confidence then the machine lets you start lobbing bouncers and cracking at yorkers and so on.

And confidence applies to the batsman too - the higher your confidence the more margin to time the ball on more aggresive strokes you have. It really is a bit like getting 'your eye in'. It also means that you have to consider playing defensive blocks sometimes in order to both frustrate the bowler and to steady your own confidence. But, and I like this, your batsmen's ability to gain confidence depends a bit on his human-counterpart's real character. A great example of this is seen in Robert Key: his confidence never really peaks and so he's never really 'set' even on a good score. But timing shots is easier with him, reflecting his technical skill.

Matches themselves are fantastic: 10-over games especially are full of pressure, tension and thrills. Atmospheric sound is superb: the charge from the crowd is palpable in a way I have never experienced in a sports game before. Graphically it’s clear that Codies spunked the entire budget on the uncannily real player physics and on player detail, whereas the grounds are rendered pretty poorly. Concentrating on the players is the absolute correct choice however as the spookily real little chaps scuttle around the field in a very convincing manner.

At times, especially playing test matches, Brian Lara’s Cricket feels like the best game of cricket you’ve ever watched on TV, and I mean that as a proper complement – this is like international cricket you can actually get involved in and have influence over. The only thing it really lacks is a ‘nap’ feature allowing you to have a little in-chair afternoon snooze.

August 2005

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