Get a full toss in the face
On the graphics side of things, as has already been noted, Brian Lara International Cricket 2005 lacks the polish of EA’s effort. This is first apparent in the front end screens but also carries across into the game itself. The visuals themselves look fine and do the job they need to adequately but the animations have a few flaws in them. It won’t be unusual to see a fielder facing a different direction when he actually lobs the ball back to the wicket keeper.
Bowling and batting animations are, on the whole, fine, but they also have little ‘gaps’ where the animation jumps from one action to another. Fortunately this don’t actually interfere with the gameplay as they’re just animations for something you’ve already chosen to do, but the downside is that they are visible and detract from what otherwise is an enjoyable game.
Another annoyance is the fielding itself, which is far better than EA’s rather hit and miss effort, (or should that be ‘catch or drop’?). What you have here is a little meter which you have to time a button press to in order to make a catch… the difficulty of the catch affect how quickly you have to hit the button and while not perfect, comes close to matching your skill with a joypad with the skills you see on the screen. But the annoying thing is the throwing in which you can only do to the wicket keeper. Why on earth can’t we lob the ball to the bowler’s end?
In real life when the ball is hit out towards the boundary, the wicket keeper and the bowler both cover their respective stumps for the throw in and often, especially if it’s a wild throw for a run out, another fielder will cover behind them too… Not so here, you can’t throw the ball anywhere except to the wicket keeper which, though keeping things simple and easy, would have made it a lot more tense being able to pick which wicket to throw to. Further, you can’t actually throw to the wicket and I’ve actually lost the chance to run a batsman out through having to lob the ball to the keeper when I was at the opposite end of the pitch with the batsman way off the crease… gutting.
