Game:Ashes Cricket 2009
Publisher/Developer:Codemasters
Genre:Cricket Sim
Verdict: The best cricket sim available and good fun even for non-cricket fans.
Pros: The batting is responsive and excellent fun.
Cons:Bowling gets tedious after a while.
Ahh cricket, the quintessentially English game that people seem to either love or loathe. There haven’t been many cricket games in recent years for the consoles, with the Xbox 360 only having the somewhat flawed Brian Lara International Cricket 2007 to keep cricket fans entertained. At last Codemasters has decided to update the cricketing genre with the timely release of Ashes Cricket 2009.
For those of you who haven’t got a clue about cricket, and I suspect there are many of you: for the past month, the Ashes have been played. The Ashes is a Test Cricket series of matches played between England and Australia, who are fierce rivals. They are played every other year and alternate between Australian and English locations. The series has been around for over 120 years and is a huge event for Cricket fans around the world.
Of course this won’t mean much to you if you know nothing of Cricket, think of it as a little like Baseball, only with some pretty complicated rules. Instead of the four bases, there are two on opposite sides to each other but a smaller distance than running from base to base. There are also wickets behind each batting player which if, hit by the ball, knocks the player out for the inning (round). It’s much, much more complicated than this at times, but that’s the simplified version.
Luckily Ashes Cricket 2009 is comprehensive enough that you can actually learn a fair bit from playing it. With most sports games you can jump right into the action and get to grips with the controls fast. This can be the case with Ashes Cricket 2009 but I wouldn’t recommend it. It really is better to play through the astonishingly thorough batting, bowling and fielding tutorials first, if you hope to become any good at the game. It is admittedly quite a long process to traverse every single tutorial but it will pay dividends. The controls initially seem a little complicated, but it doesn’t take long to get the hang of things and the voice over advice from Shane Warne and Ian Botham, Australian and English cricketing legends respectively, certainly helps affairs.
The UI ably demonstrates what buttons do what action. In batting, X is for a defensive shot, A for an attacking shot and B for a lob shot (useful for when trying to hit the ball out of the stadium and gaining 6 runs instantly), while the left stick controls where you wish to aim the ball once hit, and the right stick controls the movement of the cricketer. When written down it may sound intimidating, but it is very simple to get to grips with and ultimately comes down to a matter of timing when hitting the ball. There is nothing more satisfying in this game than hitting the ball at just the right moment and whacking it out of the stadium.
Unfortunately batting is infinitely more fun than bowling, which gets rather tedious and never ending. Bowling is a bit more complicated and features an array of different types of throws, linked to the four face buttons, as well as the ability to spin the ball with the trigger buttons. Again, it’s all a matter of accurate timing to throw the ball at the peak speed, in that time you also need to line up where the throw is going to go in order to knock out the opposing batting player.
The problem is as innings can go on for so long, it can get rather boring the longer the game goes on. I did occasionally found myself tempted to simulate the innings, so I could get past it and progress to the batting, which was infinitely more enjoyable. Despite the dull bowling sessions, it was satisfying to see that fielding is much easier to conduct than it was in Brian Lara International Cricket 2007. At that time, fielding was unwieldy and downright difficult to do correctly, but in Ashes Cricket 2009, it is a simple matter of letting the AI control things with a little encouragement from you. A nudge of the right stick affects where the ball is thrown back, in order to get the opposition ‘out’. Pressing the A button at the relevant time (when the circle around the ball turns green) ensures the ball is caught and the batting player is ‘out’ instantly. It quickly became almost as satisfying as batting and good fun to the point that if it was a more Arcadie game. I would have liked to have seen a mini-game centered on it.
Ashes Cricket 2009 is in no way a game for players who want instant gratification. It is a very effective Cricket sim, but for this reason alone, it is very slow, which is fine becuase Cricket is a fairly slow game. As an example, the fifth and final test of the current Ashes is about to start and the first test started at the beginning of July. Cricket really isn’t a fast sport; however it is quite deep and Ashes Cricket 2009 demonstrates this well. Besides offering the ability to play the full Ashes, there is also the option to play a One Day International or a Test Match against numerous other teams. Also if time is at a premium, you can play a 20 Overs match which is excellent fun and can be quickly over. The game offers all the Cricketing teams you could think of although it was a shame to see that only the English and Australian teams have the correct names for their players.
All in all, Ashes Cricket 2009 is an extremely competent Cricket sim. I did experience a few strange AI quirks such as the opposition taking risks to score an extra run or two when it really didn’t have a chance of succeeding. Another time, I had batted the ball into the distance and the opposing fielders did nothing to retrieve the ball, even though it was sitting in the middle of the field untouched. In the end, the game seemed to time out and rewarded me with the few runs that I had achieved.
Despite several bugs, I found Ashes Cricket 2009 very enjoyable. I’ll confess that I’m not a huge Cricket fan but this game converted me, which is praise indeed. Its gameplay was complicated but not in an excessively intimidating way, thanks to its excellent tutorials. It might not be much to look at with its PS2-esque graphics but if you’re a Cricket fan this really is worth purchasing, much the same if you’re a sports fan and you want something a bit different than your usual fare.
Popularity: unranked [?]
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