Date-stamped : 31 Jan95 - 18:33
PC Based Cricket Games: Allen Schmidt

    Note from CricInfo: This report was compiled in Jan 1995,
    so some of the information here may be dated...

A few months ago I started looking for PC based cricket games.
I expected this to be a difficult task since I live in the USA,
but as it turned out there is not a great deal of information
anywhere in the world about PC cricket.  After many notes and
phone calls I have now received many very nice games and I
wanted to make all those that are interested aware of their
availability.  I will preface this by saying that these are
the games that I managed to find.  There may be others out
there.  If anyone knows of any, please add to this item.

There are many different shareware and freeware cricket games.
Most are of a statistacal nature and offer little interaction
for the player.  This is not to say that they are bad games,
they are simply operating as designed.  Most are DOS based with
no graphics.

There is one statistical game which I just received which was
a very nice surprise.  It is RSC Cricket by Brett Freedman.  It
was recently posted here on rec.sport.cricket for UUDECODING.
It is windows based and is very well presented.  The shareware
versions has been recently updated to Ver 2.0 so you may want
to receive it again from one of the sources I will list later.
It allows some user interaction and allows you to set different 
sides from cricket history against one another.  Although it
is statistical in nature, I found myself getting caught up in
it as a spectator.  You do make decisions about who will bowl
and bat which offers you some control.

Two DOS based games which stand out are World Cup Cricket and
Sticky Wicket by M. J. Carter in England.  WCC simulates World
cup play (as the name implies) and Sticky Wicket simulates
the English Domestic County cricket.  A field is presented on the
screen with small circles representing the  players.  The
bowler runs up and delivers a ball which is hit.  You then have
the option of running if you like.  It plays 50 overs matches
in a reasonable amount of time.  I have found it highly
enjoyable and payed for a registered copy.

By far the best games that I found were "Allan Border's Cricket"
and "Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket".  Be advised that these
are the same games under the covers!  I learned this the hard
way by ordering each by mail.  The only difference is the picture
that is presented when you start the game.  The teams that you
select from are slightly different for each game as well.  The
Gooch game puts up many different international sides.  The
Border game puts up a a few international sides and all of the
Sheffield Shield teams.  You can create your own teams if you
like however.  In this game you actually make bowling and
batting decisions.  You see real people that look like real
people and have a chance to hit the ball and react to it.  You
can play anywhere from 20 over matches to 5 day tests.  It is
an outstanding game in my opinion.  You should be aware that
the programmers have been clever and put some kind of key on
the diskette which requires that it be in the A drive when you
start the game or it will not start.  Althoough this is done
to ensure that you will not copy the game, it worries me that
I must risk the original diskette every time I want to play.

I purchased the Border game from Games "R" Us in Brisbane.  There
is a demo diskette which I will tell you how you can get later.
On it there is a file with several sources for this game.

The Gooch game is available from Special Reserve in Harlow,
England.  They are a club wich requires a time limited (6 months,
1 year, etc) membership to be purchased.  The nummber I reached
them at was 0279 600204.  I did not have a demo for this game,
but remember that it is identical to the Border game which I did 
have and is available to you as follows shortly.

I am in no way trying to drum up business for any of the
authors or companies that I have listed.  I am simply relateing
what I found in my search as a way of sparing others the same
delay and frustration that I encountered.

There are two sources that I am aware of on the internet to
donwlad and try some of these games.

     1) The CricInfo Gopher Server

        the games have been recently added as an option under
        the CricInfo database.  Simply connect to it and
        download them.  The command I use to connect to it is

             gopher cricinfo.cricket.org 7070

        These games are only available on CricInfo via gopher.
        There are several other ways to access CricInfo, but
        they will not permit you to download the games.

     2) Anonymous FTP to FTP.CS.UMN.EDU
        An individual at UMN has made an FTP server available
        for download of these games.  They are located in

             /users/karnik/cricket/bin

I hope that this information helps some of you out there.  It
certainly would have helped me a few months ago.  Enjoy the
games and, if any others are discovered, please make CricInfo,
rec.sport.cricket and, most importantly, me aware of them.

Happy gaming,

Allen M. Schmidt
ams@xnet.com

<END> Contributed by Allen.Schmidt (ams@xnet.com)