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Does not matter if you were fascinated by Dean Jones' enthralling and revolutionary way of playing the one-day game, or if you got hooked into the sport by visuals of a rampant Curtly Ambrose being virtually unplayable for most of the nineties, or even if it was AB de Villiers' topsy-turvy takedown of any bowler in the world that instilled in you cricketing ambition, whatever generation you belonged to, the desire for emulation of your heroes remained constantly rampant.
However, in the course of running down the bowlers like Jones, you felt confined by the narrow streets of Old Delhi, the disappointing absence of Carribean genes meant Ambrose's menace remained untouched by you and well, you would have to be a freak to get anywhere near what de Villiers managed to do with that smug nonchalance.
This is where you turned to the ever-reliable virtual emulation. Video games meant that for the last three decades, you have been blessed with the option of getting closer to your Lord's Honours Board fantasy, or World Cup glory, or even an IPL contract. I am not permitted to judge you for not aiming high. Be it a desire to get that personal greatness you never attained on the field or to just thrash the side the team you support got beaten by, these games were always there.
Cricket games have never been perfect given how the varied reactional mechanism and improvisational nature of the sport do not allow developers to create a perfect model of the real sport, but with time we have come much closer to seeing a cricket game that is about as realistic in simulating the sport as its football and basketball counterparts. In the light of that, we look at the five cricket games that were quite iconic and to this day remain a part of every cricket fan's fond memories.
#5 npower Test Series
This flash game, howsoever minimalistic and limited in terms of gameplay, will remain as one of the pioneering video games of cricket. Launched during India's tour of England in 2002, it became an instant hit given the ease of play and a non-existent learning curve involved.
With no players' names involved and no concept of "result", this game evoked the sheer joy of batting, the sole motive being to score as much as you could. Three directional arrow keys, with no combinations involved, the player had to play the stroke as per the line of the ball (this was back in the day when there were no Jos Buttlers to shamelessly waltz two feet outside off-stump to hit a 90 mph ball across its line) and the timing of the shot yielded runs.
In the twelve overs game, the added elements were the delightful sound of the English crowd acknowledging each time the ball hit the fence with polite applause and each wicket followed by an ecstatic cry of "Out!" The game featured joyful cricket and an experience in the Test match whites all packed in an easily accessible flash file of a megabyte.
#4 Stick Cricket
Another all-time favorite, Stick Cricket was developed by Sydney-based Cann Creative and was later launched in collaboration with Cricinfo, another purely batting based cricket game but with more context, more teams and surprisingly enough everyone was right-handed.
With time though, the ownership went to Stick Sports and thus was created the best ever online and mobile cricketing experience. Play the All-Star slog and puppeteer Haynes and Greenidge into reaching the par score of 0/547 off 20 overs, or avenge your World Cup nightmares with the World Domination version of it (Lance Klusener, are you reading this?), Stick Cricket offers it all.
The gameplay is simple enough, as is the game motto, "Hit out or get out!" Stick Cricket continues to build its player base all over the world to this day, with better graphics, added game features, cheeky grins from batsmen and dirty looks from the maltreated bowlers, and a franchise cricket version, one to play tests, you say it and they have it.
Also, do yourself a favor and follow their Twitter handle, today.
#3 Cricket Revolution
Formulated by Pakistan's Mindstorm Studios, this game was relatively low-profile in its origins but turned out to be one of the most promising in its category. Unlike the previous two, Cricket Revolution provided a proper cricket experience and had its creators had a better financial backing, they could have made it truly the best cricket game of all time.
It had everything cricket games in the past like Ashes Cricket and Brian Lara International Cricket lacked in terms of the deficient gameplay, providing features like the ability to place the ball into the gaps, "adrenaline" and "settled" levels for the bowlers and batsmen respectively to indicate their mindset and the corresponding reflection in immediate performance.
What it lacked was the licensed player likeness rights which meant that the creators went ahead with entirely fictional squads, other shortcomings were the absence of Test and domestic cricket and a much-required autoplay mode (because let's face it, nobody likes taking the field and putting up with 300 balls of oppositions' batting). For those, however, the game made up for with an online mode, which enabled PvP contests, both over LAN and through Mindstorm's servers.
#2 Cricket 07
This cricket game will take you straight back to the time where you might have struggled with memorizing Shakespeare quotes but could synchronize your "You can't set fields for a shot like that, brilliant!" along with the game's commentators.
After seven editions of failure, poor player engines and an inability to resemble an actual match of cricket, EA Sports finally got their act together and blessed us with Cricket 07. Scenarios from the Ashes 2005 that were as gripping as the series between cricket's oldest rivals, a comprehensive player creation tool, domestic circuits and pre-loaded fixtures of two seasons of County Cricket and Aussie State cricket, World Cup, Champions Trophy, this game had it all.
The bowling was much improved from its predecessors, as was the variety in the batting, while that made the learning curve for this game somewhat steeper than all the games before, it only meant that the user experience was much more enhanced. It also supported joysticks and gaming controllers, which led to a broader ground of interactivity.
Although online PvP would have made this near-perfect game virtually immortal despite the usual glitches you see in simulation video games, the gaming community over the world keeps the game active to this day with latest mods for every major upcoming tournament.
Oh, and, "It's Mark Nicholas and alongside me, is Richie Benaud."
#1 Don Bradman Cricket 17
A slight improvisation of its parent game DBC 14, this game turned out be everything a cricket fan ever asked for. Big Ant Studios put in four years into the development of this game and when you played it, you understood why.
While the high-specifications demand and the controller-only requirement of this cricket game slightly lowered the accessibility of it, but apart from that it managed to bring together the virtues of cricket games from before, without none of the vices. The game has an AI better than any before, which means that your opposition will not just block the yorker with five runs needed off two.
Among other notable features, there is a 360-degree stroke-range both of the front and the back-foot, ability to play in different eras of cricket, pitches that wear as the match progresses, a real-world resembling database of cricketers available for downloading on the Big Ant servers, a career mode that now begins at the grassroots instead of stateside or County like DBC 14, and the most groundbreaking of all, this is the first cricket game to incorporate women's cricket in it.
The success of the game meant that Big Ant furthered to renovate this game into the Ashes Cricket 2017, with much-improved shots thanks to real stroke input from real cricketers recorded by 25 multi-angled cameras shooting at 720 fps.
