C64 Game Memories - Revisited 30+ Years later : Graham Gooch's Test Cricket

Now this is a very UK centric game for you, which probably never saw the light of day the other side of the pond unless a few ex-pats picked it up!

First up, this is by any definition not a great game but it needs to be put into perspective for the time it was released. Cricket is not a game that translates to computer games very well, apart from stat based games like cricket captain. For those that understand the scoring system in cricket, well computer adaptations always end up with you 240-1 off 10 overs and its totally unrealistic game mechanics.

Graham Gooch's Test Cricket was released by Audiogenic in 1985 at a time when most cricket games were dots moving around an overhead shot of a cricket field. It was very revolutionary for the time with its 3D graphics (!) and was by far the best game until Brian Lara cricket in the mid 1990's.

Gameplay was limited, for instance you just hit the firebutton and a direction to play a shot. You couldn't move about and as a bowler all you did was waggle the joystick to run up and bowl. The fielding was automatically done, so you were absolutely livid when your fielders constantly dropped a catch. Infact because the 'action' scenes were repeated you could end up telling what the catch or drop scene was before it happened.

Definitely of its time, and not really playable these days with much better games out there but it has a place in any collection of mine due to nostalgia as I picked it up after the Ashes win in the same year it was released.

Interesting, in researching the game again for this post I noticed that it looks like this game was repackaged as Allan Borders Cricket for an Aussie audience.