After a long break, the Indian cricket team is finally back into action. The start of the season hasn't been an auspicious one though with our team going down in yet another ODI final. In this country full of cricket experts, I am sure everyone had an opinion or advice to improve the performance of our team. In reality, the idea of the selection committee seeking your advice is far fetched (unless of course, you are Jagmohan Dalmiya). Hence, there's always the virtual option. EA Sports always provides us with one every year and here's there latest installment - Cricket 2005.
Well, obviously you don't just play the selector in the game but practically get to be every person on the cricket field that matters (except the umpire). Cricket games aren't a new phenomena here and every release generates a fair amount of interest and understandably so. Ever since the first cricket game for Windows was released, only 2 developers have made a serious attempt to create a cricket game and improve it - EA and Codemasters. While EA has regularly released newer versions of their cricket games starting from Cricket 97, Codemasters has been a lot more passive as far as the number of releases is concerned. However, Codemasters have to their credit, arguably the best ever and one of the largest selling cricket games of all times - Brian Lara Cricket 99 (BLC).
While Codemasters's core focus was game-play, EA Sports seemed to concentrate more on the visual elements. The result being EA Sports' Cricket games got better and better in graphics with every release but BLC's game-play remained unmatched. The entertainment factor in Cricket 2004 never got remotely close to the level of BLC. Now it's time for Cricket 2005. The box says, "Using the very best of EA Sports technology, Cricket has been completely re-invented for 2005 to look and play like the cricket game that you have always dreamed about". I am not sure what that means (especially after playing the game). I was only hoping that it wouldn't turn out to be yet another bag of eye-candy that would leave the gamers mouthing scornfully - it's just not cricket!
Stumped Off the First Ball
And this was even before I started playing the game. The 2 CD installation was a smooth process however I was forced to restart my PC to play the game. A demanding game huh! That's what I thought till I started the game (or rather tried to start it). An error message flashed on my screen telling that I had some CD emulation software and the game would start only after I disabled it. Well, I was using the licensed copy of the game. I disabled the Virtual Clone drive, closed all the related processes running in the background and tried to start the game again but was confronted with the same error. I removed all the Clone CD entries from the startup and rebooted my PC but it vain again. The game started only after I uninstalled Clone CD. Now give me a break. Making the user remove a third party software just because you feel threatened of someone making illegal copies of your software is not fair at all and to an extent it is unethical. After all Clone CD is not just about making illegal copies of software and loading up unauthorized disk images.
And here's the joke. Someone I know who purchased a pirated copy of this game informed me that he never experienced this problem on his cracked version. Well EA, your trick certainly isn't proving instrumental in curbing piracy but is just giving an unnecessary headache to those with a licensed copy. Time to rethink your strategy.
Best looking cricket game till date, updated teams and tournament types
Poor game-play, limited range of shots, hardly any novelty, out of context and repetitive commentary, no option to change video settings and controls, needs you uninstall other software
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