Anyway here goes my indepth review/recollection:
Walking into Transmission Games was quite exciting. I'll admit, after their last few AFL games, I was very pessimistic about their ability to develop a good sports game, but as I soon found out, bigger budgets are helpful. Meeting a few guys from the forum was quite strange, especially WHM who is a lot less intimidating in real life than in red
.
The four of us (myself, WHM, stevo and angryangy) started off in the same room listening to Heath and Rob speak about the game and show us around a little. I was the first to try it out, as Australia batting in the Ashes. We all started off on normal (there are three difficulties - easy, normal and hard), which Heath called the more balanced one. Hard is more of a simulation he said, and easy is just "pick up and slog". The batting controls were pretty much the same as the old ones, except for the manual foot selection (automatic, but you can go manual at any time and press both to advance down the wicket, but if you miss the ball remember to get back in your crease!). The good thing about controls for both batting and bowling is that they show up on the screen, with little graphics of what they each do as well as text.
The first thing I noticed was that even on normal, it's much harder than BLIC07 at its hardest. Timing is crucial, and what I thought was good timing ended up being much too slow. Reaction time, like real cricket, is very short, and that adds to the challenge. The better the ball is, the quicker your time to hit the ball is, and if it's a poor ball, you get more time to hit it sweetly. If you hit it too late or early, you get an edge, but these edges are more realistic - they don't all go straight to keeper or slips cordon, they are much thinner and usually go straight down, unless your timing is terrible. Unlike in previous games, terrible ones aren't the most difficult to play - you genuinely feel the difference. WHM even tried bowling Andrew Strauss to see if terrible medium pacers were still surprisingly good, and I smashed him to all corners, really feeling the difference.
We split up after a little bit to try out co-op. I played against WHM in a Twenty20 (Australia v England, fully licensed) and quickly learnt that he was pretty awful at it. I bowled first and dismissed him for about 39 (he blamed it on being England), which I chased down in about 5 or so overs. This gave me my first taste of bowling as well. Bowling is a major improvement in the game from BLIC07. No longer is it just send the ball down ball after ball and wait for a mistake to come. There are two parts to bowling a good delivery - the first is landing the ball on a colour co-ordinated area of the pitch that is considered good for the type of delivery, and then you had to also make sure the power meter was in the good zone. Too early, and the ball is poorly delivered, too late and it's a no ball. Certainly against Matt, the only thing I needed to do was aim for the stumps and watch him miss.
The other thing is the range of deliveries. Rather than choosing swing in mid-air, there are two "menus" of deliveries - swing, seam and reverse swing (which doesn't work until the ball is old enough). In each there is your standard delivery, your two movement balls and the slower ball. Unfortunately Australia's lack of spinners in the team meant I didn't get to explore much of the spinners - I only bowled one over of Michael Clarke and he wasn't too good obviously. Also, for each delivery you can see a quick summary of what it does, and how fast it can be for a particular bowler.
Bowler speeds are more realistic than previous games too, not necessarily in the realism from bowler to bowler, which is good but a little off sometimes, but there's less of the old BLIC 90km/h deliveries from a pace bowler if you press it too early. You'll get decent speeds for most normal balls, although the slower ball did seem too slow at one stage (Harmison gave me one at 105 km/h).
Running between the wickets now features sliding in and diving, and third umpire referrals are much more exciting. Action replays too are great, a good mix between slow motion when the ball comes off the bat and speeding up as it goes into the crowd.
The stadiums are also incredible. We played in Melbourne, which is incredibly authentic, and then we played in Karachi and really felt, saw and heard the difference. There is background music from the crowd, posters around the ground (hit it to me, Go Aussies etc) and the ground surfaces are fantastic - Karachi's was very worn, much less green than Melbourne's. Karachi also had these army guys standing on the boundary. The crowd is not perfect but better than most sports games too, so it looks good. The electronic scoreboards even work! The pitches were also quite good - Cardiff on day 3 showed a lot of cracks.
Ball and bat physics look a lot better than in the videos and screenshots, the ball comes off a lot more nicely. WHM said that when he last played it it was a lot like BLIC07 but now it's its own game for sure.
I'm sure I've missed plenty but I'll leave it there for now. Any questions or queries, happy to answer them. As I said before, I'm very optimistic about this game after playing it, and it will definitely be the best cricket game so far, by far.
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