D&H Games
£10.99
Reviewer: James Leach

Cricket is the ideal sport for lazy people. Just think about it - you get paid to stand around in the middle of a field for a few hours, getting a suntan and occasionally having to jog after a ball that gently rolls in your general direction. What a life! Every so often you have to make a bit of an effort and do some batting or bowling (or shouting "Howzat!"), but for the most part it's pure loafing heaven.

So what better game to convert onto your Speccy, eh? All you need to do is get an extension cable, go outside, then play this game in a suitable field - you can enjoy all the excitement as if it was the real thing. Hurrah!

SUMMER NIGHT'S CRICKET

And with a summer (of sorts) upon us, D&H Games thought a cricket game might be just the ticket. Better still, they decided to go for one with graphics (of other sorts). But hold on! Before I go any further I should point out that cricket and strategy games are, for many people, the 2 most boring things on the surface of this planet (so if you fall into that category then you'd better not read any further because you might die of utter tedium).

Right. Now I've only got the interested people left,. Gather round. In Cricket Captain, you are (guess what?) the captain and manager of a cricket team. This consists of looking down on the pitch, with very small blobs representing the peeps involved. If your team is batting you just have to sit and watch as the bowlers chuck spinners at your guys. A line is then drawn from the bowler to the batsman, with another line showing where he hits the ball. If it goes through a fielder, you're caught. And if it reaches the edge of the pitch it's 4 runs. Easy-peasy stuff, but if you're a cricket fan you could get hooked.

D&H have speeded up the action (phew!) so while every important shot is shown, the boring ones aren't, so the overs tend to zip by very quickly. It's a sort of highlights-only system. What it means is that a full Test Match takes about a quarter of an hour to play. During this time you can change your batting order and your bowlers, and also move the fielders around.

What is impressive is the accuracy of the programming. It includes all the possible ways of being out, dozens of different shots to play and even silly things like dropping the ball when it should be a safe catch. And the way the runs are scored is also very similar to the real thing, so when your best batsmen approach their centuries (isn't that a bit old? Ed) you'll get more and more excited until you let rip with a huge 'Hurrah!" when they make it.

ALL ABOARD, (CRICKET) CAPTAIN!

So really, Cricket Captain is for cricket fans only. Surprise surprise. It has the disadvantage of making you sit there with nothing to do for long periods, but if you watch cricket on the telly you'll be used to this kind of thing anyway (yawn).

There are 2 tournaments, as well as league matches and all the usual management-sim options that you'd expect from a D&H game (buying players, training, swopping, spying, bribing, you know the stuff).

So it's not all sitting there twiddling your thumbs - but a lot of it is. All in all, it's not that different from the real thing. If I were you I'd stand up, strap on your pads and go out and do exactly the same but in the sunshine instead.

D&H Games
£9.99 cass
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Football Director? I know it's hard to iamgine anyone getting bored with the best of all footie management sims (I still think it's streets ahead of FD II), but you never know, it's possible. All well and good then that those sim-freaks at D & H ( which stands for De Salis & Huggard, triv fans) are in the process of turning virtually every other imaginable sport into the same sort of management sim.

By an amazing coincidence, I have three of the little critters sitting in front of me. Now, I'm willing to agree that whether or not you like Grand Prix, Cricket Captain and Boxing Manager 2 will depend very much on whether you like those games - but I'm absolutely certain that if you didn't like FD, you'll HATE 'em with a passion. So if the mere sign of the legend 'Please Wait' drives you insane with fury, turn to another page now. (Go on, I'll understand.) So let's dig in, before these games get cold.

This, though, is another kettle of halibut entirely. Whole Grand Prix is broadly accurate (or at least accurate enough to stop you blanching at every inaccuracy), Cricket Captain is all over the place. It's pretty clear here that no-one knows too much about the game beyond the most basic there's-this-geezer-with-the-ball. Otherwise how could you explain the way the best bowlers are always the best batsmen, something that doesn't happen more than once a generation in real life? In choosing the statistics to hone in on, the writers have fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of cricket, and perhaps more important the appeal of the statistics themselves. The whole notion of the 'transfer market' too is completely inaccurate. And most frustrating of all, each team is full of those randomly generated names we all remember from Football Director II - W Bukby, J Lijten and so forth. I recognise that it's probably harder to do a decent cricket sim than any other - no-one has come even close on any computer - but this is well below D&H's usual high standards.

D&H Games
£9.99 cassette
0462 816103
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

Cricket, eh? The classic English past time, giving lots of elderly mad people a good excuse to fall asleep in deckchairs, occasionally waking up to mumble some half-hearted hurrahs. Anyway - the game. "Ridiculously poor - programmed by people who haven't a clue what they're talking about" unanimously concluded the late Dr Berkman in April 1990. Just to check that it wasn't merely Dr B who didn't know what he's talking about, I had a few goes and now, a few games the wiser, can safely ascertain that Cricket Manager really is, if you'll excuse the expression, a whopping great steaming pile of poo.

The game mainly falls down in two areas. Firstly, it's a management game, but I didn't actually think that being a management game would count as an 'area'. So firstly, it falls down on the programming. Boring lists, UDG defined graphics, unsensitive key presses, superfluous pauses even to draw up tables, no sound, predominantly BASIC - look wise Cricket Captain even out-craps the antique Football Manager, and at least Footy Manager was vaguely realistic. Cricket Captain isn't (area 2); the best bowlers are always the best batsmen (since when?), winning seems more like luck than skill and the whole idea of buying and selling players in a cricket game seems a bit dubious. Personally, I'd rather take a babe on an all-expenses paid holiday to Hawaii than play this boring, unoriginal and unrealistic management re-release.

Label: Cult
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £3.99 Tape
Reviewer: Tony Naqvi

Zzzzzzzzzz! Wha... oh.. sorry, must have fallen asleep. Where were we? Ah yes, Cricket Captain. Not being much of a cricket or sports management sim fan, I must confess I... I was surprised by this game.

As with all management sims, be they football or cricket or any sport you're the boss of an unlikely bunch with a duty to train them, pay them, transfer them etc. Then generally sit back and let them get on with it, hoping (in my case usually in vain) that they'll win a game.

The idea of this game is to win the J.P. & C.A. Leagues (??? Not named after anything obvious are they?) and the two associated cups. You must work your way up the league table, and come out on top with a perfect team to win, but naturally at the end of the day it's the participation, not the winning that counts.

As soon as the game is loaded, you are presented with a menu. The menu displays sub-menus which include: Game, Team, Bowlers, Scout, Injuries, Youth Team, Fixtures, J.P. League table, C.A. League table and Net Training. Using these menus, which regulate the squad. It's new, old and available members, it's rival teams strength's and weaknesses etc. It is up to you to try a make as good a team as you possibly can.

After each match the game results are displayed along with the rest of the day's results and you can see how well you're doing by selecting the league table menus. In all of this the graphics are clear and text is readable. Screens take some time to update but the in match play sequences do look pretty.

Unfortunately that's it though. Cricket captain is a lot prettier than many other management sims but the same old format has been repeated again. If you're REEAALLY into cricket, you might like this game, but otherwise I can't recommend it.

ALAN:
Cricket Captain certainly didn't bowl this commentator over. However those who buy management sims usually know what they are letting themselves in for so fans of the genre who are also cricket maniacs could conceivably find it interesting.