Cricket Life 2007 released (maybe)

Cricket Life 2007 is due to be released on Saturday, although being as we haven't received a press release or a review copy and being as Cricket Life's official website's down, perhaps it's been put back again.

In the event that it hasn't been put back, here's some stuff:

Our Cricket Life 2007 preview
Some of Cricket Life's features
A few more of Cricket Life's features
The reason why Gamebience, the manufacturers of Cricket Life won't ever again be welcome in the North-West of England

Old Trafford post-renovation

It's going to be in London, apparently. Either that or they're going to recreate London's skyline as a backdrop.

*OR* Gamebience, Cricket Life 2007's Canadian developers, have confused Manchester with London, which is a very big mistake to make where we live (Manchester).

On the left is an interpretation of London's skyline in 2012. On the right is a detail of a Cricket Life screenshot of Old Trafford.






Dear Canada,

Please try and control your videogame developers. We know that you are aware of more than one British city - you're not the US, after all - so please don't attempt to pass off the future skyline of London as that of present-day Manchester.

Don't let it happen again or we'll ask all of your residents what part of America they're from whenever we meet one. We don't want to do this, but if you can not control your videogame developers, we refuse to be held responsible for our actions.

Yours sincerely,
The United Kingdom

Some kind of special award goes to The Scientician for spotting this. We're really going to have to give him a job or something if he persists in making a much better fist of creating updates for this site than we do.

We'd also like to point out that he's contributed to about three updates on this site in the time he's done precisely NONE for his own site, so maybe he should get his own house in order before stealing all the glory and limelight round at someone else's.

This may sound like faint praise for someone who's made a frankly world-class spot and offered it to us for free, but bear in mind that we've just had to spend half an hour cropping photos and remembering bits of XHTML that we'd long since forgotten when really we should have been working.

More Cricket Life features

We like writing about Cricket Life. Apologies to all of our readers who are grown-ups and can't play video games because all the other captains of industry down at the squash club will think they're simpletons if they admit as much.

For the rest of you who aren't held back by weighty burdens such as friends or 'being mature', read on.

We've previously listed some of the greatest features of Cricket Life 2007. Here are some more:

• Gamers may choose to use media, intelligence and strategy to defeat opponents. We're 'media'. You could use us. We could wage a petty-minded war against Matthew Hayden if you wanted. This game is JUST LIKE REAL LIFE.
• Gamers can invest hard-earned, in-game money in business and property. This is NOT just like real life. In real life we invest money in DVD box-sets of The Wire and electricity bills. We certainly don't have enough to invest in 'business'.
• Gamers can add more countries through add-ons. We're not too sure what this means. Either you can gather up all of the world's bears and give them their own republic in northern Canada, or the developers just haven't bothered with any of the non-cricketing countries, like Greenland, Mexico or Zimbabwe.
  

Most of the other features revolve around being rich and clever, so we can't really identify with them. Also, we're supposed to be working and should really stop getting distracted, otherwise we won't be finished by the 7th of July, 2007.

To finish, here's a picture of Old Trafford looking less decrepit than usual and also featuring rather more skyscrapers than we remember in the background.




Update: We're not sure if we were first, but we DID beat Gamebience in announcing the release date of the game - and they're the ones who made it.

Cricket Life 2007 release date

We're not allowed to publish this until Monday the 26th of February, which is odd, because we only got it today. It might be that we received it in the early hours, UK time. If everyone in the States is still sitting on this, then does that make it a WORLD EXCLUSIVE?

Oh, right, all those hundreds of countries that are east of the UK - they're all ahead of us, aren't they?

Cricket Life 2007 will be out on 07/07/07, which shouldn't be too hard to remember. It strikes us that that doesn't leave an awful lot of 2007 within which the game can look up-to-date. Could it be that this game has been delayed a bit. The press release says:

"Gamers and cricket-lovers around the world will have an opportunity to continue the cricket fever within the game even after the world cup is over. As July is a holiday season in many countries around the world, we thought this would be the right time to release the game."

This rather backs us up. 'Continuing the cricket fever', sounds rather like putting a brave face on missing the World Cup boat. Also, July's only really a holiday season in countries where it's summer and therefore everyone will be outdoors. Still, what were laptops made for, if not enjoying indoor pursuits outdoors?

We're still quite excited about Cricket Life. Hopefully we've not lost our review copy by insinuating that the developers have been slow and lazy.