A cricket game at #1 as summer approaches is a lot less puzzling than the Winter Olympics thing, even if it’s also a first. Cricket is a reasonably popular British English sport. And athletics, baseball, American football, and speedball had all had their moments before cricket got its moment(s) in 1995. This one is a console remake of a PC game called Graham Gooch Cricket, and it takes on the name of Brian Lara, a West Indies player whose record-setting recent exploits had often come at the expense of England. His star-power was enough to help it here regardless; it’s difficult to imagine the same thing happening with, say, a Diego Maradona Football.
I don’t understand cricket much better than baseball, even if I have spent a lot more time listening to colleagues checking in on the latest scores in it. Many of the intricacies are lost on me, but I have a general outline of the rules – someone throws a ball at a galactic field gate, and someone else with a bat tries to hit it past them and everyone else and run back and forth. This level of insight was enough to get on pretty well with Brian Lara Cricket, especially once I changed fielding to automatic and had fewer things to worry about. It’s an even more welcoming game than Hardball, with a similar line in big player sprites taking up lots of the screen, looking impressive in their immaculate whites (you can change to the brightly coloured pyjamas of the one-day-international version of the sport if you like, but it looks a lot worse).
When you’re bowling, there’s a nice variation on the golf-game-style multiple timing-test approach, where you have to first line up a wildly oscillating pointer and then keep hitting a button to increase power. Different types of bowlers get different approaches, and I found that I got on best with fast bowlers and the approach of throwing the ball as hard as possible to force the batsman into a defensive stance that wouldn’t hit the ball far enough to get anywhere. Other bowling approaches introduced a level of randomness that was more difficult to work with, with some of my most successful moments coming from failing the rhythm game and throwing an easy ball which the batsman over-confidently smacked for one of my players to catch.
On the batting side, Brian Lara Cricket makes it pretty easy to hit the ball, if not usually very far, and to take decisions over whether you’ve done so well enough to have time to score some runs. You can also choose to press B and hit the ball higher, and my early results with that summarised what makes this work so well as a game. The first time I did it, the ball went flying past the field for a triumphant six, signalled by the umpire in a close-up which gives a good sense of ceremony to it all. I immediately went for a repeat, and hit it straight up and into the waiting hands of an opposition player.
Like the real sport, one of the challenges to Brian Lara Cricket is how bloody long a game goes on for. Attritional fast bowling may have been my most successful tactic, but that was outweighed by how boring it was going to get long before the match was over. Not a great reason to do anything. That problem aside, though, I can actually imagine that playing more of this earlier might even have made me a little more interested in the sport, which is a good measure of success for any game.
Gallup cartridge chart, Computer Trade Weekly 22 May 1995 (chart for week to 13 May 1995)