Tim Love's Cricket

The Good
In the Dragon version the game takes place with two simultaneous views- side on and above, a novel approach at the time and one that really works. This is a marked upgrade on the C64 version that attempts to do more, giving the shot behind the bowler, but does not do it as well. The graphics thus come across really well, and the game feels very well thought-out. A slightly complicated method of bowling and batting makes full use of the potentiometer joysticks that were commonly used with the Dragon machine, allowing, for example, very specific placement of where you want the ball to land. The green and black colour set sits naturally rather well with the Dragon's inherent colour characteristics whilst still giving the feeling of being cricket. An ability to save the game is especially welcome, as is the fact that the game is part machine code, part basic, and thus exceptionally easy to rewrite if you do not like the amount of batting and bowling points provided, for example.

The Bad
The sound is relatively primitive, written using the Dragon's poor basic sound functions. Much better was achieved on the same machine, the key being to avoid the Dragon's basic if you wanted something listenable. As a boy I simply used the Dragon's ability to switch the cassette on and off via Basic and to play through the TV so that I could have real BBC cricket music of the time (I believe it is called Soul Limbo). Sadly the game has a small issue- a full toss at speed on the top of off stump normally beats the computer when it is being the batsman, whilst the fielding part of the game seems to cheat many a batsman out. Again it is easy to fiddle around with and fix, but that is not the point.

The Bottom Line
Minor niggles aside, this is actually one of the best sports games of the 8 bit era, regardless of platform, one of few sports games that not only lived up to expectations, but exceeded them. For the cricket fan, it was perfect, the game that helped cement my love of the machine, a passion I still indulge 30 years later. For the games fan who was not into cricket there is much to enjoy.