Nudge one off the leg stump
When you get a new game, the very first thing you do is slap it in your machine a load it up to try it out… none of that messing about reading the manual stuff, you just want to get on and play. Sure, you might have a quick scan through to have shifter at the controls and then it’s time to dive and play. And satisfyingly, Brian Lara International Cricket 2005 lets you do just that. Any right-minded player would opt to go in and have a bat first and this is where Brian Lara’s ease of use comes to the fore. Batting is still very much a question of timing, but unlike EA’s Cricket 2005, Brian Lara is far more forgiving, meaning that within minutes of starting play you can be slogging balls all over the ground like a seasoned pro. Batting control is very simple, with a few buttons for which sort of stroke to play and then a joystick for where you want to belt it. Now the purists might argue that cricket just doesn’t work like that, so ramp up the difficulty level and you’ll get a much more realistic experience where the batter’s confidence comes into play more and more, but we’ll talk about that later.
Switch to bowling and again Brian Lara trumps EA Cricket 2005. Keeping things simple, you use the joystick to set bowling speed and where you want the ball to bounce, then use one of a variety of buttons for the actual type of delivery you want, then use the joystick again for after touch spin effects. After a very short while you’ll be placing balls right where you want them and with the ease with which you can modify the fielder placements, you should have the unwary batter chipping to the slips in no time.
Now I mentioned confidence earlier and this is a key factor in how well your on screen persona plays. Those Botham-esque sixes off a classic sweeping front foot shot only become possible once your batter has built up his confidence meter. Similarly, a slow spin bowler will only be able to chuck a googly once he’s made a few deliveries that have kept the run rate down low. So in effect, just as in real life, play well and you’ll be on a high, playing better than before but play badly and you’ll find yourself stuck in a rut that can be hard to climb out of.
The confidence system simulates what happens in a real cricket match pretty closely as anyone who’s watched the collapse of the middle batting order in a cricket match will testify. Get run out and then go for a few dodgy boundary shots and you’ll soon lose your batsmen, meaning that the freshly in batter is facing a supremely confident bowler and faces much more chance of being out… fast. Happily, these situations don’t mean a complete disaster of a match as playing a few defensive shots will see the batters confidence grow again. Likewise, bowlers have a confidence meter and the fewer runs scored and more batters they get out, the higher that meter goes. Of course, if a batsmen starts scoring runs off a bowler, that bowler is going to lose confidence, meaning he hasn’t got the guts to go for the riskier, but potentially more effective deliveries.
