Posted by How’s it work then?
You captain/coach either a county side, an international side or both. You train your players, select your team, make your bowling changes, tell them where to bowl, position your field, gauge how much to attack with the bat, decide when to take the new ball – pretty much everything.
You can even call Ian Bell a dick for dropping a sitter, although he won’t hear you, because he’s only a pixellated representation of Ian Bell and not the man himself. He will miss straight ones though.
Any good?
Yup. The International Cricket Captain games have been refined over time and they’re pretty decent now. We’d prefer there to be more long-term planning and less on-field decision-making, but that’s personal preference.
The fact is it offers a lot. You can train youth players in anticipation of using them six seasons down the line and you can then spend ten minutes moving your fielders around for the fifth over of a Twenty20 game against Derbyshire.
Graphics
The graphics are okay now and at least the highlights don’t take ages, like they did in one of the earlier versions. You see a bit too much of spinners’ run-ups in each highlight, but it’s all fairly snappy and the match graphics feature Hawkeye and some graphs. Everyone loves graphs.
Sound
Jonathan Agnew commentates. He didn’t get annoying in the time we played, but you can switch him off if you’re playing a longer stint.
Training in International Cricket Captain 2009
Bizarrely, considering that cricket’s such a statistical game, International Cricket Captain doesn’t go in for statistics in the same way that football management games do. We feel this is a mistake, as cricket fans are generally overfond of stats. Why not exploit this identifiable personality defect?
Instead, it’s all a bit TOO real. Each player has a host of attributes defining how they play, but these attributes are invisible. You have to judge whether your batsmen are any good on the offside by ACTUALLY WATCHING THEM. This is a bit laborious for our tastes. It’s very admirable making the game so realistic, but an option to see the players’ attributes in number form would be quicker for those of us with jobs and maybe even the odd friend.
On the plus side, you are notified when a player improves in some facet of the game now, so you’re not completely in the dark about whether your training sessions are having any impact or not.
‘Ah, Paul Horton’s one better at defensive shots now,’ you exclaim – totally unaware of how significant that one is. Is it one out of ten? One out of a hundred? Who knows? All that matters is that Paul Horton’s one better.
Verdict
If you’ve played a previous version to death (of your own social life), you’re unlikely to find enough here to draw you back to overly-obsessed solitary squalor. If you’ve never played, you should definitely give it a go. Training youth players for the Ashes bid in six years time is obscenely addictive.
Buy it from Amazon
No mac version?
This is an anorak version.
Come on, people – that had to be done.
The worst part was always wicketkeepers. How the bloomin’ ‘eck am I supposed to know whether this one 18 y/o kid will be able to catch in 6 years time!?
(I laughed at the above pun)
Out loud?
Mmmm…..this article provoked two thoughts from me:
1.) Aggers is the greatest commentator/pundit (closely followed by Willis with Mark “sensationalist and everything is the best ever” Nicholas rock bottom) and I did not appreciate the defamatory tone with which you appraised him within the game review
2.) Does KC actually have a job to go to? I had just assumed he (/she) just sat by their PC waiting for appeals to come through
Can you please find some way to make Paul Horton one better in real life please KC? He is killing my fantasy cricket team with a series of failures in the County Championship.
downloaded demo version.
played out a tame high-scoring draw with warwickshire on a road at taunton.
tim ambrose got a big hundred.
neil carter bowled like a broken donkey.
can’t afford to buy the thing but was pretty impressed, it’s come a long way in 10 years.
It took 30 mins to download, was it worth the time when i can play 2006 “ashes” version for free?
At the risk of actually talking about cricket laws 2009 still allows the fielders to trample all over the boundary rope without any chance of a boundary. The umpires now signal byes as leg byes and Hawkeye has no idea about balls hitting the pad outside the off stump.
Flintoff, Swann, Broad all have sunflower yellow hair now, does the England camp have a resident stylist?
I played that Warks/Somerset game too, they also had the old fashioned sight screen on wheels but no-one sitting behind it. It was a full house tho to watch the dross that Warks serve out now. The Tests had loads of empty seats.
Im totaly addicted to this game, along with Football Manager, Cricket Captain 2010 is the best managment games…..