Another World Cup flop

It seemed a smart piece of marketing: launch the latest Brian Lara Cricket game during the World Cup when the West Indies captain should be king of all he surveys. Throw in the latest stadia and licensed names and you're onto a winner. But just as the World Cup suffered through a lack of organisation and foresight, so I came across lots of unexpected obstacles my attempts to play Lara. And even when the game was loaded, it wasn't all it promised.

Three office computers rejected the disk flat out, the next was more promising, before rejecting. Apparently potential piracy was at work: lunacy; I had a bona fide copy. My laptop was more promising and lo! The disk actually loaded, while the official, catchy music enticed "Want to feel good?" and I did, "Want to feel high?", that, too. But then the crashes began ... leaving me feeling - you guessed it - bad, and low.

The load-screens themselves could have done without with their patronising explanations of ducks and byes and bouncers - if you're into cricket so much you've bought this game, I'd expect you would know this. Once past those, though, I did get into several menus, which offered such excitements as the promising "slog mode".

Yet I had only got as far as looking at the player profiles and laughing at how ridiculous they were - bearing even less resemblance to those downloadable masks on the BBC - when the machine crashed again. I then tried to set up a net session; more crashing. I was feeling as frustrated as a World Cup fan who'd been priced out of the market for the Caribbean - I knew delights aplenty were tantalisingly close, and yet just out of my reach.

I took this as a sign to stick to real-life cricket, gave up on the PC disk, and called in two of my serious gaming friends, Dave and Sam, who each had the Playstation version. I also roped in my fiancé, Dan, who already owns a previous version so hired the game to see if this was much of an improvement. This is what they told me:

"It's all wrong!" cried Dan who, incidentally, was reviewing the game in Australia - where it's been rebranded Ricky Ponting Cricket. "The stadiums are packed, and there's too much atmosphere."

Naughty jokes aside, the gameplay is smoother than previous versions, but the bowlers still look like robots with one stock action that would make Angus Fraser look like a smooth operator. As Sam says: "It's very lazy of the creators when all the other movements are now quite realistic."

Dave adds: "The spinners look dodgy - like medium pacers off a short run," while Dan reported that there were factual errors such as Flintoff and Panesar opening the bowling for England.

The batting is also too easy: Dave tells me he mastered hitting a six within five minutes. This feature appealed to Dan, though, as he doesn't want to spend ages getting to grips with how a game works - and he was happy with being able to smash 355 from 30 overs. Typical Aussie.

But Dave's impressed with the "really cool" graphics of the stadia, and HawkEye is incorporated, too. Indeed, the graphics are much advanced but the consensus was that it's much better to improve the actual gameplay - which they hadn't - than the fancy imagery. A wasted opportunity. At the risk of going all Jeremy Clarkson - if the engine's not firing smoothly, and the handling's too clunky, then what use the leather seats and plush interior?

Overall, this isn't the kind of game the panel could spend hours playing. "It's just so clunky," says Sam, "and that makes it frustrating when you see all the other games out there are so realistic and this is palpably not." Dave has played his for about an hour, and won't be picking it up any time soon - he prefers EA Sports. Dan was sending his back to the hire shop; the gameplay wasn't discernibly different enough to be worth buying another. Sadly, it's back to the drawing board - another World Cup flop.