Foreword

Cricket is a sport played in relatively few areas of the world. And these areas are not the traditional videogame markets, so finding a videogame of this game is not as easy as with other sports.

Unless other popular sport in former british colonies, with copious fans in Japan.

The australian company Laser Beam Entertainment, with experience in the market of videogames, but not sports ones, developes one for Cricket. Probably trying to match it with the euphory of its country for the celebration of the 1992 Cricket World CupCopa in the island.

The final product is a very basic videogame of cricket, which captures the thrills and emotion of the sport. It can also be really didactic for those of us, not very familiar with this interesting sport.

Game

Controls

As we have already writte, the videogame covers the most basic option of the sport. With one button the player at the offense can bat, or running between stumps while the other button is used to return to the last stump visited by the offensive player.

Deffensively, the main focs is in the bowler, at least I was not able to spot a significant difference on which button used to bowl the ball towards the batter.

When filding, ussualy the focus goes to the fielder closest to the ball. If the fieler gets the ball can throw the ball towards a stump with one button, and to the other one using the other button of the console’s controller.

Up to here we have covered the basics. Because the pace of the game depends on the amount of Overs selected, and how quickly are dispatched the batters of the team at the offense.

Before the start of any match, and between Overs, the videoplayer, while deffending, can make adjustements at the field, moving fielders across the field. We recommend making slight adjustements between every Over.

We think that is mandatory, to change the initial deffensive formation suggested by the videogame, because that particular formation allows a lot of runs from the rival team. Don’ worry if you are not familiarized with the huge amount of fielding positions and field zones, here we provide one that really works. Basically the goal of this particular formation is limit the amount of times the ball reaches the field borders.

Team Lineup

It’s important to build a balanced team, because in cricket the players are polifunctional, but some players shine more in certain areas (batting, speed, bowling) than others. In this file:

We provide a file listing the players by team, including position. It does not matter which team you choose to play, we recommend the following lineup:

• 4 batters (position B in the file)
• 1 Wicket Keeper (position WK in the file, only one per team)
• 1 Spin Bowler (position S in the file) These dudes bowl slow.
• 2 Fast Bowlers (position F in the file) These dudes bowl fast.
• 2 All Rounders (position A or AS in the file). They can be good, but not excelent, either batters or bowlers.
• 1 remaining spot for your preference:
  • Batter
  • All Rounder
  • Medium Bowler (position M in the file).

We recommend leving the bowlers at the bottom of your lineup, for quickly locating them when changing the bowler due to change of Over.

Countries

The participant teams are from countries considered powerhouses in cricket. For this particular game, are the nations which compited in the 1992 Cricket World Cup (sans Zimbabwe).

It will propably caught your attention the team West Indies. This team is a combined selection of players from English-speaking nations from the Caribbean (mainly Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago). During the 70s they were a powerhouse, and still are a feared team.

Really there is no significant difference in difficulty, but it can be notorious which are the best teams. We recommed using West Indies, South Africa or England, for beginners in this videogame.

Epilogue

The videogame is really good, but it has a very important detail which can be frustrating for rookie players, in this videogame or the real sport. It assumes the videoplayers knows enough of how to place the fielders at the field. As already written, the default one is really faulty and easily allows 100 or more runs. Which I learned is more frequent in real life than I thought.

Basically, the deffensive formation should allow the least amount of times, the ball reached the borders of the field. Because that’s the way more runs are socored. Both by the rival, and the videoplayer.

We also recommend in the game options, configure the duration to 25 Overs, for various reasons: The main one being is the closest one to the most used duration in real life. Also, with 30 or more, the match can take a lot of time, which is closer to the duration of a match at the time when he videogame was developed.

Lastly, if you begin to play the videoame, recommend to always choose batting last. This way is less pressure to know how many runs are needed to reach the rival’s score instead of deffending an advantage. This is the reason we don’t recommend 10 Overs, because probably will not be enough to catch the rival.

References

Sport Icon designed by Smashicons of FlatIcon licensed by CC 3.0 BY.

Console Icon taken from Retroarch.

Information about players and position fielders at the field taken from GameFAQs.