GameGeeker's resident cricket nut, Paul Varley, gets his teeth into this rather quaint cricket management sim...
My love of the sport of cricket has caused a range of emotions from my colleagues, from bewilderment through derision to hair-tearing "shut up about cricket for a minute, Paul!" despair. As pretty much only one other person on the staff ([whatever Betong's real name is, it escapes me for the moment]) enjoys the sport, I'm generally in the minority on the issue. So it's good to be able to let my hair down and ramble on about a cricket-based game. But enough about me, on with the review.
Michael Vaughan's Cricket Manager is, first and foremost, probably not quite what I was expecting. The funny thing is, the game was created and endorsed some time before Vaughan became famous (to cricket fans, anyway) - i.e. before his blistering run of form in 2002 and early 2003, which culminated in him becoming England captain when Nasser Hussain stood down halfway through 2003. The game was wriiten and designed in 2001 and the blurb on the back actually reads "Endorsed by the up and coming Yorkshire and England batsman Michael Vaughan" (italics mine).
The irony is, that I only saw it in the shops (and bought it) in 2004, when it cost about £5. I was assuming it would play like an updated version of the similarly titled "International Cricket Captain 2000", endorsed by Vaughan's aforementioned predecessor as captain, Nasser Hussain. Well, I was right on one of those counts, and wrong on the other. It is like ICC 2000, but it's not an update.
Well, quite frankly the game can be summarised by the following "soundbite" from me: All the joy of watching cricket on Ceefax, but slightly more interactive. Make of that what you will. I actually quite enjoy watching cricket on Ceefax, but I admit I'm in a very small minority. Watching those numbers click up is strangely addictive, though, and it's the same with this game. You control who bats, who bowls, batsmen and bowler aggression, and (to a limited degree) field placings. And that's it. Beyond that, it's in the lap of a random number generator whether the next ball produces a wicket, goes for six or is a plain old dot ball (no runs come off it, for non-cricket-fans).
Even with all this going against it, I still gained a bizarre sense of enjoyment from it. This may stem from the fact that, playing as my home county of Middlesex, I managed to win something like fourteen straight games on the trot in the County Championship (generally by a policy of giving my bowlers carte blanche to bowl as aggressively as possible and try to get sides out for less than 200).
Basically, for the purposes of whether you'll like this game or not, you'll fall into one of three categories. You either don't like cricket (strange person), like cricket but don't see the point of all the stats (probably quite a sensible person), or you're a cricket and cricket stats nut (like me). This game only really appeals to the last set of people. It may also appeal to the kind of person who happily played the early versions of football management sims like Championship Manager, where your interaction with the game itself was watching a small bar at the top of the screen to see whereabouts in the field the ball was, and a text commentary.
There isn't much really. Contrasts can be made with International Cricket Captain 2000, which had some rather nice fixtures: it actually simulated what was going on and you could watch 3D versions of each ball, together with a (slightly garbled) commentary from radio's very own Jonathan Angew (the sane one from the BBC R4 cricket coverage team). In MVCM you get a small ball that says "4" or "6" or "1" or "W" or "." or whatever. It's a bit like playing Owzat! on computer. The "Exciting In-Game Action Screens" as promised on the back of the box are limited to background shots of Vaughany doing stuff.
MVCM certainly didn't live up to my expectations, and if I was being entirely rational I'd give it quite a low mark. But for all it's faults I still can't give it that. It has a certain charm that I love. Plus it's about cricket, so it can never be all that bad. I'll give it a straight average 5 as a compromise.