MattW
Administrator
I'm sure you've all been waiting for this, my review of the game. I'm sure I've missed some bits, but hopefully it answers a few questions:
In November last year, I went up to Transmission Games to be part of a focus group for 'an upcoming cricket game'. When I came back from that, I wasn't all that confident in how the game was going to turn out. I played the game in a test match on hard, and was able to smack the ball around easily. Oh what a difference six months can make, because the game I played yesterday was totally different, and much better for it.
Everything about the game has been improved, the most obvious difference was that the game looked stunning, those screenshots aren't prerenders, it does look like that and the complaints by people who watched the videos about jerky animations are mostly unfounded. There are indeed some issues with the animation, the most obvious is a huge delay between a catch being taken and the fielder noticing it, you'd hit the ball they'd catch it, then they just stood there while they worked out that they did indeed have a ball in their hand, which was eventually followed by joy, one of the more humorous ones was the keeper just tossing the ball back over his head, which made a good departure from throwing it vertically, as is usually the case.
Other than the occasional delay, the game is extremely smooth, which is surprising because of how detailed it is. The stadiums are fantastic, though there aren't all that many of them. The guys at Transmission explained that it was a deliberate decision to cut stadiums to focus on making the ones they kept as realistic as possible, which was a good decision. However not all the graphical enhancements are beneficial, the kits have some fancy technology to make them move with the bodies in a realistic way, however this leaves them looking like they are made of mesh, with a fairly strong grid pattern going over the top of the kits, which doesn't look very nice. For England and Australia the kits are extremely close to their real life counterparts, the unlicensed countries look fairly similar to how they looked in BLIC07.
The edit mode isn't quite as comprehensive as I'd have liked, there is no option to create a new team and there are a limited number of faces available. I'd have thought that by now you'd be able to import your own face into a cricket game in the same way that most other sports games have been able to do for years. However when you create players there is a bit more to it now, you get a set amount of points initially to put towards skills, but as you play the game you can get extra points for your players to then go and add as you like. It isn't a career mode, but it is a first step. The individual stats of players make up the team's total stats, so in theory at least, if you play well with a team like Zimbabwe (which had one star out of five) you could make them the top team in the game. Though that would take more than a little bit of patience to achieve.
The umpires are unlicenced (which will surely cause a few people to refuse to buy the game) with developers taking their place. It was interesting that the Hawk Eye showed two incorrect lbw decisions in the time I was playing, both of them were close, meaning there is a little bit of chance associated with the umpire's decisions, but not too much that clear decisions were wrong. The umpire's gestures were improved, with them actually raising their hand fully, rather than the bent elbow thing in BLIC07. It was also great to see one of those trick movements after a close decision, the umpire looking for a second like they were going to give it out, but instead put their hand on their stomach. Not a big thing, but it adds a nice touch to the game.
Fielding is an interesting part of the game, they've clearly put a lot of effort in to making it seem more interesting. Contrary to the Q&A, there is no fully auto fielding and you still have to press a button in the right timing to get the fielder to pick the ball up off the ground. Catching is very different, the game slows down and you have the ball coming towards the fielder with a circle around it, the circle changes colour based on the best timing to take the catch, get it in the green zone to take the catch. However if you are slightly out and hit the button when it is orange the fielder's stats will decide whether it is a catch or not. The difficulty of the catch along with stats and the game difficulty determine how big the green zone is for catching, but it is far more intuitive and forgiving than the BLIC07 catching system, which was rubbish.
There is a little indicator that shows you which end you are throwing at, which is good because I always forgot which button was for which end on BLIC07. And when you do throw the ball, the keeper doesn't automatically whip the bails off, which is nice. The outfield is seemingly slower, meaning you have a bit more in the way of 2s and 3s, but a well timed shot will still get to the boundary. The CPU is supposedly much smarter about fielding tactics, it wasn't immediately obvious in the short amount of time I had to play the game, but you can't just keep hitting into the one spot and not have the CPU respond.
Overthrows were still more common than I'd have liked, with the standard of fielding in cricket set as high as it is now, the game really doesn't reflect reality in that way. Though I suppose that just means you need to be attentive when fielding, but I think it isn't necessary to press a button in perfect timing to remind a fielder that their job is to field the ball.
Field settings are extremely comprehensive, with a huge amount of fields included by default, and a very smart new window allowing you to set the fields for both batsman without waiting for them to come on strike. The fields are easily customisable, though I still don't get why you just can't place any fielder in any spot, surely that wouldn't be difficult to implement.
While it still could be improved, the fielding in Ashes Cricket 2009 is far better than in BLIC07. Just need to make sure you pay attention.
Bowling is how it should be, bowl poorly and you will be punished, bowl well and you can get the edge over the batsman. I’m not a fan of the new form of pitch indicator, you get two colours to show you how close you are to a good line, green and green. They are two different shades of green, but unlike every other indicator in the game, orange and red aren’t used. I don’t really see the point in having the two colours if they don’t offer any guidance beyond that.
The bowling meter is much improved, but as it is now a meter that doesn’t reflect power, I have no real idea how you change the speed you bowl at. The type of delivery you bowl does have an impact on speed, but I think you need to have high enough confidence to do a special delivery to bowl a slower ball. I may have just been doing it wrong, but I’d never considered changing speeds something that requires you to be really confident, so I hope it was just a matter of me not pressing the correct button.
The different difficulties and the skill of the bowler determine the size of the perfect ball zone, which in turn determines how close to the middle of the bowling circle you bowl the ball. It makes a lot of sense, but will take a bit of getting used to. The age of the ball also determines special abilities, but there wasn’t enough time to get to a point where we could test that. For some reason you can simulate one over, an innings or the whole match, but you can’t simulate multiple overs at once.
There was a lot of emphasis placed on giving the AI real cricketing tactics, and from the little bit of batting against the AI I managed, it was certainly more difficult than just finding a gap and pressing a button.
Batting really is massively improved from the viewpoint of creating a proper contest, the game isn’t a slogfest, and no matter how much I tried I couldn’t hit a six. Now that has a lot to do with how absolutely rubbish I was at the game, the timing window was really small, but that meant it was very satisfying to time it perfectly, there is really a sense of achievement for hitting a good shot. I felt like you had to hit the button much earlier to play shots than on BLIC07, so I have the slight worry that once you get used to the game it will be just as easy, but somehow I doubt it when even medium was quite difficult for me initially, and on BLIC07 smashing the ball around on Test difficulty was easy.
The thing that impressed me the most about batting and bowling was just how much stats play a part, you have meters for batting/bowling confidence and stamina that relate not only to the last ball, but to the entire match situation. A batsman coming out after a lot of wickets have fallen comes out with lower confidence, and if you’ve just been out in the field all day then coming in to bat you’ll have lower stamina.
Batting isn’t substantially different in terms of its setup, the controls are roughly the same as BLIC07, you can select front foot or back foot, and defensive, attacking or lofted shots, with the aiming stick mostly in the same way as previous, only you have a smaller aiming wedge when you go on the front/back foot, and if you are a bad batsman you can get a whole quarter of the field rather than the eighths that you got for every batsman on 07, which makes that much more realistic.
While the controls are similar, the execution is mostly improved, however nearly every wicket was a stumping when batting, because you’d dance down the wicket and you wouldn’t get back in time, even if you were mashing the button to get back into your crease. In theory it is good that you have to do this, but it’s a pain how unresponsive it seemed to be. But this seemed to be the only time that there was a bit of unresponsiveness when running between wickets, in nearly all other cases it was really well executed, especially cancelling runs without hearing ‘they’re in disarray’ and the ease in which you can dive or slide your bat in for a close run.
I suppose that much of batting will be just getting used to it being different, but there is an increase in difficulty here, and run rates are much more realistic, though they are different through the levels, on easy you’d get near 10 rpo in a Test, but you’d get around 4 on Hard.
Basically, batting and bowling are just improved all round, they aren’t significantly different, but they are much more refined. Which really seems to be the case for the whole game, it has certainly looked at BLIC07 and gone about fixing the issues. They also had a copy of BLC 99 and EA Cricket 07 in their offices, so they are certainly looking at what is wrong with the games of the past, learning lessons from EA’s mistakes is certainly something they have done, especially in regards to bug testing, they said they made tiny changes and then spent a day playing the game to make sure the change didn’t introduce bugs. They cited the example of the English bowler’s speeds, they changed them after feedback about how slow they were bowling (their computers even had PlanetCricket open), and then spent the day making sure that nothing was broken because of it.
The testing processes on their own are enough to suggest that they are serious about getting this game right. Codemasters have clearly put a lot of resources behind them, and the game is much better for it.
The much hyped ‘Legends Mode’ is really nothing to be excited about, it is basically just the tutorials from BLIC07 and some challenges similar to BLIC05. It is funny hearing Warne’s sarcastic replies to Botham’s instruction, but that’s about all the joy you’ll get out of them.
Warne to me hasn’t worked well as a commentator, because he isn’t one, but you don’t hear from him much in game. Commentary is basically the same as BLIC07, some of the more annoying lines aren’t there, but you’ll still get sick of it quickly, but I’ve never played any sports game where the commentary didn’t get repetitive so it doesn’t really matter.
I certainly got the feeling that there was much that they wanted to include in the game, but just didn’t have time for. The most annoying one is that they still have the BLIC07 stumps code, meaning the collisions are odd and the stumps go out of the ground if you so much as graze the outside of off. This is something they said they wanted to fix, but other things took priority.
I hope that the game sells well, because for a first go from Transmission it is a fantastic effort. I just hope that Codemasters stay with them for the next game, so that they can build on the solid base that this game is. Not once has Codemasters made a cricket game with the same development team as the previous one, and I think it has been to their detriment. If Transmission could have kept developing for another year, you’d probably get the perfect game, it isn’t there yet, but the issues that remain are far outweighed by the quality of what is there.
I’m going to reserve my final judgment until I get the chance to give the game a few days of solid game play, but I honestly can’t see how it could go wrong from here.
In November last year, I went up to Transmission Games to be part of a focus group for 'an upcoming cricket game'. When I came back from that, I wasn't all that confident in how the game was going to turn out. I played the game in a test match on hard, and was able to smack the ball around easily. Oh what a difference six months can make, because the game I played yesterday was totally different, and much better for it.
Everything about the game has been improved, the most obvious difference was that the game looked stunning, those screenshots aren't prerenders, it does look like that and the complaints by people who watched the videos about jerky animations are mostly unfounded. There are indeed some issues with the animation, the most obvious is a huge delay between a catch being taken and the fielder noticing it, you'd hit the ball they'd catch it, then they just stood there while they worked out that they did indeed have a ball in their hand, which was eventually followed by joy, one of the more humorous ones was the keeper just tossing the ball back over his head, which made a good departure from throwing it vertically, as is usually the case.
Other than the occasional delay, the game is extremely smooth, which is surprising because of how detailed it is. The stadiums are fantastic, though there aren't all that many of them. The guys at Transmission explained that it was a deliberate decision to cut stadiums to focus on making the ones they kept as realistic as possible, which was a good decision. However not all the graphical enhancements are beneficial, the kits have some fancy technology to make them move with the bodies in a realistic way, however this leaves them looking like they are made of mesh, with a fairly strong grid pattern going over the top of the kits, which doesn't look very nice. For England and Australia the kits are extremely close to their real life counterparts, the unlicensed countries look fairly similar to how they looked in BLIC07.
The edit mode isn't quite as comprehensive as I'd have liked, there is no option to create a new team and there are a limited number of faces available. I'd have thought that by now you'd be able to import your own face into a cricket game in the same way that most other sports games have been able to do for years. However when you create players there is a bit more to it now, you get a set amount of points initially to put towards skills, but as you play the game you can get extra points for your players to then go and add as you like. It isn't a career mode, but it is a first step. The individual stats of players make up the team's total stats, so in theory at least, if you play well with a team like Zimbabwe (which had one star out of five) you could make them the top team in the game. Though that would take more than a little bit of patience to achieve.
The umpires are unlicenced (which will surely cause a few people to refuse to buy the game) with developers taking their place. It was interesting that the Hawk Eye showed two incorrect lbw decisions in the time I was playing, both of them were close, meaning there is a little bit of chance associated with the umpire's decisions, but not too much that clear decisions were wrong. The umpire's gestures were improved, with them actually raising their hand fully, rather than the bent elbow thing in BLIC07. It was also great to see one of those trick movements after a close decision, the umpire looking for a second like they were going to give it out, but instead put their hand on their stomach. Not a big thing, but it adds a nice touch to the game.
Fielding is an interesting part of the game, they've clearly put a lot of effort in to making it seem more interesting. Contrary to the Q&A, there is no fully auto fielding and you still have to press a button in the right timing to get the fielder to pick the ball up off the ground. Catching is very different, the game slows down and you have the ball coming towards the fielder with a circle around it, the circle changes colour based on the best timing to take the catch, get it in the green zone to take the catch. However if you are slightly out and hit the button when it is orange the fielder's stats will decide whether it is a catch or not. The difficulty of the catch along with stats and the game difficulty determine how big the green zone is for catching, but it is far more intuitive and forgiving than the BLIC07 catching system, which was rubbish.
There is a little indicator that shows you which end you are throwing at, which is good because I always forgot which button was for which end on BLIC07. And when you do throw the ball, the keeper doesn't automatically whip the bails off, which is nice. The outfield is seemingly slower, meaning you have a bit more in the way of 2s and 3s, but a well timed shot will still get to the boundary. The CPU is supposedly much smarter about fielding tactics, it wasn't immediately obvious in the short amount of time I had to play the game, but you can't just keep hitting into the one spot and not have the CPU respond.
Overthrows were still more common than I'd have liked, with the standard of fielding in cricket set as high as it is now, the game really doesn't reflect reality in that way. Though I suppose that just means you need to be attentive when fielding, but I think it isn't necessary to press a button in perfect timing to remind a fielder that their job is to field the ball.
Field settings are extremely comprehensive, with a huge amount of fields included by default, and a very smart new window allowing you to set the fields for both batsman without waiting for them to come on strike. The fields are easily customisable, though I still don't get why you just can't place any fielder in any spot, surely that wouldn't be difficult to implement.
While it still could be improved, the fielding in Ashes Cricket 2009 is far better than in BLIC07. Just need to make sure you pay attention.
Bowling is how it should be, bowl poorly and you will be punished, bowl well and you can get the edge over the batsman. I’m not a fan of the new form of pitch indicator, you get two colours to show you how close you are to a good line, green and green. They are two different shades of green, but unlike every other indicator in the game, orange and red aren’t used. I don’t really see the point in having the two colours if they don’t offer any guidance beyond that.
The bowling meter is much improved, but as it is now a meter that doesn’t reflect power, I have no real idea how you change the speed you bowl at. The type of delivery you bowl does have an impact on speed, but I think you need to have high enough confidence to do a special delivery to bowl a slower ball. I may have just been doing it wrong, but I’d never considered changing speeds something that requires you to be really confident, so I hope it was just a matter of me not pressing the correct button.
The different difficulties and the skill of the bowler determine the size of the perfect ball zone, which in turn determines how close to the middle of the bowling circle you bowl the ball. It makes a lot of sense, but will take a bit of getting used to. The age of the ball also determines special abilities, but there wasn’t enough time to get to a point where we could test that. For some reason you can simulate one over, an innings or the whole match, but you can’t simulate multiple overs at once.
There was a lot of emphasis placed on giving the AI real cricketing tactics, and from the little bit of batting against the AI I managed, it was certainly more difficult than just finding a gap and pressing a button.
Batting really is massively improved from the viewpoint of creating a proper contest, the game isn’t a slogfest, and no matter how much I tried I couldn’t hit a six. Now that has a lot to do with how absolutely rubbish I was at the game, the timing window was really small, but that meant it was very satisfying to time it perfectly, there is really a sense of achievement for hitting a good shot. I felt like you had to hit the button much earlier to play shots than on BLIC07, so I have the slight worry that once you get used to the game it will be just as easy, but somehow I doubt it when even medium was quite difficult for me initially, and on BLIC07 smashing the ball around on Test difficulty was easy.
The thing that impressed me the most about batting and bowling was just how much stats play a part, you have meters for batting/bowling confidence and stamina that relate not only to the last ball, but to the entire match situation. A batsman coming out after a lot of wickets have fallen comes out with lower confidence, and if you’ve just been out in the field all day then coming in to bat you’ll have lower stamina.
Batting isn’t substantially different in terms of its setup, the controls are roughly the same as BLIC07, you can select front foot or back foot, and defensive, attacking or lofted shots, with the aiming stick mostly in the same way as previous, only you have a smaller aiming wedge when you go on the front/back foot, and if you are a bad batsman you can get a whole quarter of the field rather than the eighths that you got for every batsman on 07, which makes that much more realistic.
While the controls are similar, the execution is mostly improved, however nearly every wicket was a stumping when batting, because you’d dance down the wicket and you wouldn’t get back in time, even if you were mashing the button to get back into your crease. In theory it is good that you have to do this, but it’s a pain how unresponsive it seemed to be. But this seemed to be the only time that there was a bit of unresponsiveness when running between wickets, in nearly all other cases it was really well executed, especially cancelling runs without hearing ‘they’re in disarray’ and the ease in which you can dive or slide your bat in for a close run.
I suppose that much of batting will be just getting used to it being different, but there is an increase in difficulty here, and run rates are much more realistic, though they are different through the levels, on easy you’d get near 10 rpo in a Test, but you’d get around 4 on Hard.
Basically, batting and bowling are just improved all round, they aren’t significantly different, but they are much more refined. Which really seems to be the case for the whole game, it has certainly looked at BLIC07 and gone about fixing the issues. They also had a copy of BLC 99 and EA Cricket 07 in their offices, so they are certainly looking at what is wrong with the games of the past, learning lessons from EA’s mistakes is certainly something they have done, especially in regards to bug testing, they said they made tiny changes and then spent a day playing the game to make sure the change didn’t introduce bugs. They cited the example of the English bowler’s speeds, they changed them after feedback about how slow they were bowling (their computers even had PlanetCricket open), and then spent the day making sure that nothing was broken because of it.
The testing processes on their own are enough to suggest that they are serious about getting this game right. Codemasters have clearly put a lot of resources behind them, and the game is much better for it.
The much hyped ‘Legends Mode’ is really nothing to be excited about, it is basically just the tutorials from BLIC07 and some challenges similar to BLIC05. It is funny hearing Warne’s sarcastic replies to Botham’s instruction, but that’s about all the joy you’ll get out of them.
Warne to me hasn’t worked well as a commentator, because he isn’t one, but you don’t hear from him much in game. Commentary is basically the same as BLIC07, some of the more annoying lines aren’t there, but you’ll still get sick of it quickly, but I’ve never played any sports game where the commentary didn’t get repetitive so it doesn’t really matter.
I certainly got the feeling that there was much that they wanted to include in the game, but just didn’t have time for. The most annoying one is that they still have the BLIC07 stumps code, meaning the collisions are odd and the stumps go out of the ground if you so much as graze the outside of off. This is something they said they wanted to fix, but other things took priority.
I hope that the game sells well, because for a first go from Transmission it is a fantastic effort. I just hope that Codemasters stay with them for the next game, so that they can build on the solid base that this game is. Not once has Codemasters made a cricket game with the same development team as the previous one, and I think it has been to their detriment. If Transmission could have kept developing for another year, you’d probably get the perfect game, it isn’t there yet, but the issues that remain are far outweighed by the quality of what is there.
I’m going to reserve my final judgment until I get the chance to give the game a few days of solid game play, but I honestly can’t see how it could go wrong from here.
