Why Cricket Games Don't Work

If you ask Bangladeshi sports fans what their favourite sport is, they will be torn between Cricket and Football. Sadly, however, this dilemma will not be seen when they are asked about their favourite sports video game. The main reason behind this is that, as exciting the sport might be in real life, the glorious game of uncertainties doesn't translate all that well into video games. Here's why:

BATTING

Batting requires the pitch perfect combination of footwork, shot selection and timing. However, in most games, footwork and shot selection play absolutely no role in building an innings since randomly mashing buttons almost always gets the job done. The scope of creativity also gets heavily curtailed by the frustratingly limited number of playable shots and the directions you can play the shots in. Cricket Revolution tried to tackle these issues by introducing a placement HUD and several "shot modifiers" but these ultimately ended up making the gameplay convoluted.

BOWLING

It is almost criminal how bowling, in spite of being such an important aspect of the sport, gets close to no attention in video games. Most cricket games opt for a simplistic gameplay where you place a marker on a specific point on the pitch and the bowler then delivers the ball exactly at that spot – a very inaccurate portrayal of the sport, I must say. The Don Bradman Cricket series tries to deal with this issue by coming up with its own gameplay and while the effort is commendable, the bowling ends up being very confusing since the gamer has no idea where the ball is actually going to land.

FIELDING

"Miss a catch and miss the match" – this saying in itself should be able to describe the importance of quality fielding in a cricket match. Unfortunately, most cricket games do not feature a satisfactory fielding mechanic. Chasing after the ball and throwing them manually can get extremely repetitive. The other option is to let the AI take over the fielding but most cricket games lack an AI intelligent enough to do the job properly. What's more striking is that most games do not have any mechanic for catching or stumping. Ashes Cricket 2009 used slow-mo QTE sequences for catching but did not have any proper answers about stumping or fielding in general. 

AUDIO

A major part of the FIFA series' success can be attributed to its fantastic crowd sounds and lively commentary. Sadly, the same cannot be said for any of the cricket games in recent time. Brian Lara International Cricket '99 had different crowd sounds for different stadiums and teams, and the commentary was very fresh and organic. All the video games after that, including entries from the same series, suffered severely from generic crowd sounds and repetitive commentary.

VISUALS

The final nail in the coffin for cricket games is the lack of eye-catching visuals. Cricket games have only a fraction of the budget AAA games have and consequently feature outdated visuals. To add to the misery, cricket games often lack licensed players and teams and opt to replace them with generic made-up players instead. Cricket Power was the only recent game to have fully licensed players and teams but the developers completely wasted the opportunity by not making any use of the player likenesses in the game. 

Cricket, as a sport, is very complex. If developers focus too much on getting the details right with the limited budget they have, the end result is bound to be sub-par. Instead, I believe, developers should focus on creating immersive atmospheres and addictive gameplay.

Nony Khondaker is an introvert who complements his non-existent social life with video games, Netflix and a whole lot of ice-cream. Send him memes and cat videos to cheer him up at fb.com/NonyKhondaker