Freddie Flintoff on EA Cricket 2007

An off the cuff verdict from Andrew Flintoff on his continuing association with EA Cricket:

“It’s great to return for the second year working with EA SPORTS. Their previous games have been a good source of entertainment and relaxation for myself and the team when on tour, and I’m sure the competition will be just as fierce this time round between the lads as we look to retain the Ashes on the Cricket 07 game, as well as looking to do it for real out in Australia.”

In no way were those words put in Flintoff's mouth. If you were going to blatantly make up a quote for someone to advertise your product, don't you think that you'd make it a bit snappier?

We're looking forward to the picture above reappearing only with '2005' replaced by '2007'.

Buy EA Cricket 2007 for PS2
Buy EA Cricket 2007 for PC

Age of Umpires

Apparently, if you complete the game you unlock Dickie Bird. He has special Superman vision, so he can be 100% accurate when giving lbw appeals.

We didn't write any of this. It's a bit too 'mainstream' for us. It's a page of the Uncyclopedia.

Cricket Captain 3 demo

EA Cricket installments come out to great fanfare with celebrity endorsements. The Cricket Life people email us and keep us abreast of things. Empire Interactive however, don't tend to bother telling anyone when they release a new version of International Cricket Captain - or Cricket Captain as it's now more pleasingly known.

We rather bad-mouthed the original International Cricket Captain. We were right. We weren't right about International Cricket Captain 2006 though. It turns out it wasn't just a database update. We played it and it's still believable in 2019. Batsmen can still score runs and Gavin Hamilton was never at any point the best bowler in the world.

The graphics were still garbage though, which is where Cricket Captain 3 comes in. It looks much nicer and appears to include Hawkeye, the tracking thing that shows the path of each delivery.



The game looks to be much the same, but if Hawkeye's included, it must be for a reason. Maybe you can examine each player's ability to swing the ball. That adds another dimension.

Get the free demo here for nowt.

Get the full game here for more than nowt.

More cricket games

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

ConnecTV Cricket

There's nothing like playing a simulated cricket game is there? Lose eight wickets without scoring a run. Bowl 15 consecutive no-balls. Smash the controller by repeatedly driving it into the wall in pure, blood-red frustration.

Well now you don't need to go to the effort of destroying your equipment deliberately. ConnecTV Cricket features a bat that you can swing about wildy, your movements being inexpertly translated into something entirely different and useless on screen.

It also features a ball which is ingeniously attached by a wire, so you have to go through the bizarre motion of actually bowling without letting go of the ball. Of course being as it's on a wire, you'll probably only succeed in garotting the batsman.

Buy ConnecTV here and discover whether you've got the patience of Job.

That should be their slogan.

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.

Test Match Cricket - the table-top game

Super Cricket? What the blazes is Super Cricket? That, my friend, is Test Match Cricket. And what's with the weird layout of the pitch? It's all gone to rack and ruin.

It's essentially the same game though, let's be fair. Although in our day the bowler was just a glorified ramp. At least your batsman's still a broken toy waiting to happen. Some things never change.

Back when the bowler delivered the ball down a long chute, you could actually hit the ball-bearing back up it, launching it into the air, possibly scaring the cat. In fact we seem to remember more than one instance of 'cat stopped play' as she either chased the ball-bearing, got her claws caught in the immaculately ironed pitch, or stopped for a sleep in the middle of the wicket.

Such were the joys of Test Match Cricket. That and writing down full scorecards for every match and having to somehow fix things so that the tail-end didn't score more runs than your batsmen. That seems to be the abiding theme with all of these games: They're hard to believe in. Do you know why that is? It's because they're games and not real life. We really really really should have made more effort to play for England. Maybe we wouldn't be such a mental if we'd managed it.

More cricket games

The waiting is over.

Yesterday's news was; Sri Lanka beat South Africa; Kallis will probably have to go home; Sehwag and Dravid fell three runs short of the Test opening partnership record; and... EA Cricket 2005 arrived. Hurray.

We started a one-day game as Pakistan against India and Virender Sehwag hit us all round the park - just like in real life.

We started a four-day tour match as Australia (so we didn't mind being rubbish) against Derbyshire and in half an hour of play, just about nothing happened - just like real life.

Jason Gillespie didn't even look like getting a wicket - just like real life.

On a slightly sour note, the first thing that we did was practice batting in the nets and we actually got a bit nervous. This adds further weight to our belief that maybe we're not cut out for Test cricket. Maybe we're a bowler.

Last of our free time frittered away

Hurray. We bought EA Cricket 2005 on ebay at the weekend, but only because Andrew Flintoff made us using the Damien Martyn technique.

We're hoping that we can edit the players so that Shahid Afridi is from Levenshulme and therefore plays for Lancashire and England.