Not if you bowl properly.
Save every over, or improve your fielder's skills.
Batting is too forgiving for the player and AI: I like that theres no guaranteed way to get a batsman out every time. Unfortunately they took it too far...
True, but hardly gamebreaking.
Ditto.
Agreed.
The AI batsman play each ball not on merit or as the match situation demands, but whether its in one of three or four PRE-DETERMINED magic yellow spots where they automatically defend.
Rubbish. Graphics are good and some players likenesses are good as well, albeit not all.
Online game awful.
Now, I?ve probably missed a few out, and a quick rummage around the forum here (at least the parts that haven?t been deleted) will show up any I?ve missed.
The BIG way round this, and the argument people are most making as to why this game is made playable despite these shortcomings, is:
It's very easy to tell the difference between an ordinary run out and an AI -suicide-o-run-out.
2) Move the bowling arrow round at the last second. This DOES NOT simply cause a nice realistic odd occasion of a batsman being caught LBW or being bowled through the gate, but tricks the AI into playing a false shot, sometimes off the wrong foot, that looks like blind cricket without the bell in the ball. So a batsman goes for a square cut off the back foot and gets caught LBW. Yay.
3) Alter the fielding settings and abilities to maximum to reduce the absurd run outs. Ok, so now EVERY player in the game has the same fielding attributes. An old world cup cricket game on the SNES did better 15 years ago! Also, what if I want to play as England or Australia?? (two of the most popular teams in the game), you can?t edit their stats, can you.
4) Even though you know you could play 6 lofted shots for boundaries off the first over of a test match, on hard difficulty, don?t. Make yourself only score at a realistic rate, even though an average player with moderate timing could score 20 an over on hard mode. Is it fun to restrict yourself this way?
Now, again I could hunt around for more examples, but we get the idea. Here?s my conclusion...
If you don?t mind saving after every over, and making all these unbelievably absurd tweaks to get a half decent game of cricket, then, with NO trace of sarcasm, I say well done. You are getting to play a game of cricket you enjoy, and clearly the joy from this outweighs the hassle and irritation of saving every over and ignoring run outs, which also wipe out everything else that happened in that over you now pretended never happened.
Me, and many others, sadly cannot, or will not do this. This is, indeed, our loss. But... is it right that we should be put into a position where a game has SO many absurd faults and irritations that we have to go through so much to make it barely playable? If I buy FIFA 2010 this year, and its a nice game, and I get the same gooey feeling passing the ball around the field I got when in AC09 I first played a late cut off the back foot for 4 through the Aussie field (see, I do like the game engine!) but theres a fault... namely, the referees are unrealistically harsh and its not uncommon to see 2-4 red cards a game... this makes the game not only irritating from a gameplay perspective but also frustrating for anyone requiring realism from their sports games. Now, even if I could save the game, mid match, every 5 minutes, and then just go back and load my last save after every red card... I wouldn?t. It would be considered a gameplay fault so bad EA would receive a huge amount of criticism, and the game wouldn?t be fun to play.
AC09 has SEVERAL faults like this, from the lack of LBWS and bowleds, to the high run rates in test matches, to the frequent run outs. This, in my opinion, makes it a bad game, albeit a bad game with a VERY GOOD AND PROMISING game engine that bodes well for the next game in the series. I write this not to criticise all aspects of the game, or to get into an unnecessary war of words with people who disagree, but to say that some people clearly are able to look beyond these faults, and some aren?t. I am genuinely jealous of those that can, as they are able to play a game I have been waiting for for years. But even if you ARE able to work round these issues, in my opinion that doesn?t change the fact that these issues and faults should NEVER have been there in the first place, and they make for a game that should struggle to achieve even a respectable rating out of 10.
Sales of the game have been promising - this is because ashes cricket 09 is the ONLY fish in a large pond. The games faults are proven in the forums, and in the number of games that are being returned or exchanged.
