Ashes Cricket 2009

Review from AJ - Tuesday, 03 November 2009 @ 8:55pm

I don’t think I’ve ever fallen asleep playing a video game. For the first time, last night, I fell asleep whilst holding a controller. I’ve never been so entirely bored out of my brain. Honestly. I do like Cricket. It’s not like I hate the sport. Once the Bombers were knocked out of the AFL finals, I logged on to Cricket.com.au to see when the Cricket starts. It’s just that whilst most games make a point of involving you in action that you otherwise couldn’t be part of, Ashes Cricket 2009 seems to go out of its way to make you feel like you’re just watching the game on TV.

The first thing I did when I sat down with Ashes Cricket 2009 was head straight into an Ashes tour match. I sat and watched as the Poms knocked 50 off only about 4 overs. Before I go any further, there are two things which you should get out of the last sentence.

1. This is NOT a game you can play without having gone through the tutorial.

2. The game is more like watching than playing.

Let me address point 1, naturally, first. This is a cricket simulator. It’s not an arcade game. This means you really need a fairly intimate knowledge of cricket to get even a basic understanding of how to play this game. Unless you understand Cricket as a sport you will lose, and you will hate the game because you don’t understand WHY. Not because the game is wrong, but that the game is too right.

If only the game were played down here with the action...

The problem here is that not many games out there expect you to know HOW a sport works to be able to play it. To play Project Gotham Racing, you don’t need to understand the finer concepts of how traction and down-force affect to what degree power is converted to forward motion, or how turning whilst braking reduces the amount of grip available to do either, thus making you crash headlong into a wall. The game just looks after these things for you. Of course, if you’re an expert you can turn off all the assists and learn the lessons the hard way, the choice is yours. The point is, the game is flexible in how “realistic” it plays. Ashes Cricket 2009 isn’t. Ashes Cricket expects you to know that a short ball should be played off the back foot, that bowling down the leg side will get you hit for six and that field placement is just as important as either batting or bowling. This isn’t about knowing the rules of the game, this is about knowing the finer aspects of the sport. Racing, basketball, golf, tennis, baseball and a million other sporting games allow the player to pretend they’re an expert. Ashes Cricket 2009 practically demands it.

...yeah that's a cut scene too

Ok, so point 2. Plenty of games put you in the thick of things, whilst for many sports it’s not all that practical. The general rule is that an individual sport will have you in the driver’s seat (racing, boxing, bowling) and a team sport will have you play from the side lines, or a TV perspective (basketball, NFL, soccer). Then there are sports which are a little bit of both. Tennis really requires you to see the whole court, so the baseline view makes sense. Baseball is all about the batter, so the view is from his perspective. Cricket, is a team sport, but whilst it may make sense to have the view from a TV perspective, for me it makes me feel like a viewer. I don’t want to be a viewer. Why can’t Cricket games be played from the batsmen’s perspective like Baseball? The game would be a lot more involving if it were. In reality there is no reason a Cricket game can’t be played in exactly the same way as Baseball. Unfortunately, the end result for me is that I feel like I’m just watching an incredibly dull game of cricket between two teams I really don’t care about. If I don’t feel like I’m part of the action, why am I playing it? I’d rather go watch the real thing. The one exception to this is the catching "quick time" events. These show the fielder from an over the shoulder view, and you're task is to time pushing the A button just at the right to make it stick. It's immersive and is one of the few moments where you actually have to be awake to play.

...and that

Now, at the top of the review I commented on how after 4 overs the English had managed to amass 50 runs. I subsequently went and sat through about 3 hours of dull, boring, slow tutorials (and didn’t finish I might add... not even for 5 achievement points), turned the difficulty down to easy and found myself suddenly smashing 25 runs an over. At one stage I had Ricky Ponting on 200 off something like 8 overs....in a Test match. Perplexing. This was fun for an innings or two, but hitting a 6 off every ball DOES become tedious fairly quickly. So I switched back to the normal difficulty setting, and whilst I was still able to destroy the bowlers in pretty convincing fashion, it was at least a little more difficult to do so consistently. So in the end, batting turns out to be pretty enjoyable.

You can't see his head, but it's also a cut scene

How about the bowling?

I’m glad you asked. As mentioned earlier, Ashes Cricket 2009 is the first game I’ve ever fallen asleep playing. I fell asleep whilst bowling. The trouble with bowling is that there is a fairly tight area where a delivery is considered to be the right line and length. You can of course bowl shorter or fuller, but generally a consistent line and length is the way to go. Bowling short or full can result in you being smacked over the fence. No, bowling defensively means bowling just outside off stump (the default location) and trying for a variation in swing and seam. The problem here is the end result is just pushing A, B, X or Y to run up and then again to deliver. Over and over and over again. Given that ever just a 20/20 match will have you repeating that exercise at least 120 times, and a test match consists of a minimum of 90 overs a day for FIVE days, that’s 2700 deliveries of which you could reasonably expect to bowl half.

Ah! Here we go... This is where you play from!

BORING!!

Most sport games are aimed at fans of a sport. That’s fair enough. But unless you’re a mad keen cricket fan, this game will bore you to tears. Don’t get me wrong, the game is TECHNICALLY great. But, even if you had Van Gogh paint a picture of a turd, it’d still be a picture of a turd. People used to always complain to me about how boring Cricket is, and I used to staunchly defend the sport as being one of the true great sports. This game, aimed at fans of Cricket, has made me see that Cricket really is a truly boring boring game. The only way I could sit through another game of Ashes Cricket 2009 would be if I had a dozen mates around and we were building a beer snake.

Pros

Technically a good cricket game
The catching quick time events wake you up
Graphically quite nice
Control methods are low-tech, but still work nicely

Cons

BORING
Not immersive, I don't feel like a player.
Not a lot in the way of customisation.
Who seriously has the time to sit through a 5 match test series??
Difficulty setting is really the "boring" setting.

Summary

Look, technically Ashes Cricket 2009 is one of the better Cricket simulators out there. But simulating grass growing would be more exciting. I love Cricket and I had a really hard time getting into this game. As it turns out, it's not the game's fault, Cricket is just a shitful boring sport...and I just apparently hadn't realised that until now.