Brian Lara International Cricket 2005’s four weeks at the top of the UK games chart were a product of a remarkable summer for British cricket. Its success was also a monument to a cultural centrality which cricket’s powers-that-be had already decided to sacrifice for a future of Sky TV cash. And so, in 2009, for the next Ashes series in the UK, a reduced echo in the world of video games.
This time, Codemasters had got hold of the actual licence, even, rather than shoving historic Ashes matches and the Cricket World Cup together around an awkward gap. They even had a Wii version with motion controlled cricketing alongside the more standard ones. Despite that, Ashes Cricket 2009 could still only do two weeks at the top of the combined formats chart before Wii Sports Resort re-asserted its position. The trend didn’t stop there. Four years later and under a different developer and publisher, Ashes Cricket 2013 would be withdrawn from sale soon after being released as an unfinished, buggy, hilarious mess.
No such problems for Ashes Cricket 2009, which is rather well-polished. That’s one of the things it can add while still offering an approach not far from what its predecessor did in 1995. Batting involves selecting direction and choosing whether to go aggressive or defensive, with a bit of timing. Bowling involves a more intense swingometer timing game and selecting from a wider range of player-specific options. Fielding has its own timing games. They’re introduced well through a series of careful tutorials, and they work.
The ball goes where you might expect it to, even if usually not where you want it to. There are endless opportunities for tense LBW calls and moments when stealing a run probably wasn’t such a good idea. The radar-type graphic showing in simple form where your batsman is aiming are a particularly inspired touch, making sense of silly mid-off, and just backwards of square, et cetera with an effortless flair. I even found myself starting to learn about some of the intricacies of spin bowling.
The other thing which Ashes Cricket 2009 goes big on is momentum. Mood. The feeling in the air that things are about to take a turn. The players at the bat and ball have confidence ratings, and by gradually doing the basics of the job right, they build up and allow you to do bigger things. It’s all a bit quantifying the unquantifiable, but it does lend a bit more long-term narrative outside the moment-to-moment repetitive action.
Even so, there is no getting away from the same central truth that was there in 1995 and 2005. Popularity and formats come and go, and that truth remains. Cricket is a long, slow game. At least, to play it properly you have to get good enough to make it long and slow, and otherwise you only have access to the alternative of being fast and bad. There are no mainstream football video games which operate on the expectation that you will play a single match for 90 minutes, but cricket in its highly structured way doesn’t compress down to a smaller version of the whole so easily.
The tutorials do progress into a series of short challenges as one alternative — well, short for cricket. And there are the shorter formats of the sport available, which are merely extremely long rather than interminable. There are other ways that things could have been livened up, perhaps. There is precedent in related sports, as every baseball game in Sean Seanson’s odyssey through every Namco release on the PlayStation shows. Sadly, Ashes Cricket 2009 features no historically-themed cricket RPG mode. Maybe that would be just not cricket. It is a cricket game for cricket fans excited about watching and playing cricket, and there were already starting to be fewer of them around.
Top of the charts for week ending 8 August 2009:
Top of the charts for week ending 15 August 2009:
