Cricket 2005 (Xbox)

To bowl, you select the type of delivery according to the bowler type (outswinger, yorker, offcutter, leg break etc.), then a cursor appears on the pitch which you need to position to select the area the ball is going to pitch in or around, then you select the amount of spin or swing you want to impart on the ball, then stop a power meter according to how fast you want to bowl. The batsmen than adjusts his feet, sets himself and plays from a range of strokes. It works almost exactly the same as its predecessors, and brings only slightly better graphics (duh) to the table, but everything else is either the same or worse than earlier versions on other platforms.

Overall every aspect feels unfinished or not properly thought through - I don't know if EA Sports were rushing to get the game to market in time for the Ashes....or were trying to get some of the market ahead of the release of Lara 2005, but the result is something which looks and feels like it's not been fully developed or tested.

The interface for options and settings is clunky, the team selection screen is unusable: when selecting an England team, you effectively have to choose from a list of all eligible (English born) cricketers. And here EA have stolen a march on the competition - they have coughed up for all the official licenses - and presumably locked out Codemasters as part of the deal. So EA Cricket has all the proper venues by name such as Lord's and the WACA, the proper cricket governing board names and logos and all of the international players, whereas Brian Lara cricket has to make do with lookalike logos slightly misspelled player names and grounds such as 'north London'. Wow - comprehensive you might think, 1-0 to EA Sports, but the list of all players is a single L-O-N-G list, not browsable by player type (fast bowler, batter, wicket keeper) and arranged....by first name, reversed!! So if I wanted Kevin Pietersen, Ashley Giles and Marcus Trescothick in my side, I need to laboriously trawl up and down a MASSIVE list of players, very slowly, to find all the people I want...and that's if I know all their first names...for example I wanted Pietersen but momentarily forgot his first initial...so I was stumped. It's like they've gone out of their way to make the squad selection as awkward and illogical as possible.

As mentioned elsewhere, incredibly you can't save the games!!! This is staggeringly idiotic - heads surely must be rolling at EA for this. I still can't believe it myself and keep thinking I've missed something somewhere....but no, if you want to play a Test match...you're there for the duration.

As menioned above, due to the licensing coup, the players' faces are supposed to be modelled on the real players, but as with so many examples of this technology, the resulting virtual Michael Vaughan and Freddy Flintoff look like they've undergone exhaustive plastic surgery for severe facial burns, with only moderate success. The other players range from unrecognisable to generic. The graphics are just plain lazy and lack imagination: the set routines such as fielders backing up at the bowler's end look rubbish, batsmen when running a single run 15 yards past the return crease and then stand stock still facing the boundary ropes, and the little nuances and areas where EA Sports could have got attention to detail right, are wrong. The flight of the ball just looks wrong, the way it rolls to the boundary rope is wrong, fielders moon walk or levitate an inch above the grass when fielding, the crowd is laughable - they look like a bunch of flimsy cardboard cutouts in a strong wind on a constant loop....unbelievably, at the end of a row of seats in the crowd, you sometimes see half a person...where the crowd graphic has just been trimmed to the length of the row of seats. And the noise from the crowd is similarly repetitive and illogical.

Another backward step is the commentary; when I first powered the game up I went into the nets and was immediately concerned by the commentary: bear in mind that I'm in the nets, not in a game situation where so many other factors might have to be taken into account to produce realistic situation-relevant commentary. All Jim Maxwell has to concentate on is my single batsman, one ball at a time. But he gets it utterly wrong! I go knocked off my feet by a bouncer which caught me full in the face...and Maxwell said something like, 'He timed that really well!'. When we get into a game situation, Richie Benaud fares no better (when my on drive was snapped up at midwicket Richie said, 'he's got that through the gap to long on'. The commentary just bares little relevance to what you're seeing on the screen...and it is all really jarringly and clumsily spliced together from clips that it gets in the way of the game experience. It's really awful, and not a patch on Agnew's and Boycott's commentary on the PCOne Brian Lara game, which was absolutely first class.

There are a few nice ideas here - such as the batsman having to play himself in and build his confidence during an innings, but really it's been realised spectacularly poorly - and much better done in Brian Lara 2005...which also includes a bowler's confidence meter. The ability to dance down the wicket is a novel feature - in all other cricket games you were limited to sideays movement at the crease only. EA also has the benefit of being able to autoplay to the next wicket or even autoplay an entire innings (handy if you want to bat but can't be bothered to bowl). But the downside to this is, EA cricket REALLY NEEDS autoplay due to its many shortcomings.

At no stage though does the game make any kind of strategy or logic worth anything - there's not correlation between the different deliveries you're bowling and your field setting to what the batsmen are doing and the relative success they're having. I've played my fair share of EA sports titles down the years and this one does them a HUGE disservice, and is literally an affront to gamers' intelligence.

1. You can not save matches unlike in 2004.

2. Batters can not move when the bowler runs up, again unrealistic and again you can do this in 2004.

3.Numerous glitches in the game like the commentators get the wrong score etc.

4.Huge delay by the umpire when he is not going to give you out.

5.Third umpire is rushed and unrealistic

The positives elements are:

1.Special ball selection when you bowl well.

2.Footmarks on the pitch in test matches.

3.You get a better idea where the ball is going to swing when you bowl.

4. Improved graphics of players faces.

5. The 20/20 cup competition.

Conclusion

If you have a copy of 2004 I really recommend that you do not buy this game.In fact I really do not understand why EA have not withdrawn this game from the shops period.

I would highly recommend Brian Lara 2005 for the historical or international cricket fan who has mates to play against.BL 2005 is more polished and its commentry is fantastic.However, it does not have the autoplay function of the EA games.But,at least you can save the game on this version and on EA 2004.Which for realsim and the county experience is a better game in my opinion than this one.