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Summer's here. All over the country, people are dousing their cricket bats in linseed oil, ironing creases in their whites and limbering up for another season of good-natured sportsmanship on the village green. Cricket has sadly been one area of sporting endeavour which has been neglected on your ST. Until now.

Quite why there are so few cricketing sims on the ST is something of a mystery. After all, it is a renowned international sport with a massive following, yet all we've been given is Robin Smith's Cricket and D&H Games' Cricket Captain, neither of which established this epitome of English sport as a force to challenge the likes of Sensible Soccer and Kick Off 2.

Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket could be about to change all that. It bypasses the pastoral idyll of the village green and plumps for some hard-nosed international competition instead. You can choose from ten test-playing sides including England, Australia and the West Indies, each with a full complement of 20 famous cricketing stars. If that's not enough to get you batting on your ST, you can always invent a few teams of your own.

There's also a whole set of match options for you to choose from. Games can take place over one to five days and you can choose to play from as few as twenty overs per innings to more than 90. You can also choose the number of innings you want each team to have. Matches can be played against your ST, a pal or you can even let your ST play against itself.

Once you've set up your team, gameplay can begin in earnest. The action takes place from a slightly above-and-behind view of the wicket from the bowler's end, like you get on the TV coverage of test matches. This gives you a good perspective on the unfolding events and makes controlling both batsmen and bowlers a cinch.

If you're batting you have a few seconds to position the batsmen in front of the stumps before the bowler begins his run up. You must then play a stroke appropriate to the bowler's over - get it wrong and you could end up being caught first ball, get it right and you could score four, or even six.

Bowling is equally straightforward - you position the small white square in front of the wicket, then unleash a googly on the opposing batsmen.

The whole game is controlled with a combination of joystick and mouse movements. The mouse is best for accessing the different menus, while the joystick is used for both battting manoeuvres and a spot of manic waggling when it come to bowling and making runs. The graphics and sprites are extremely realistic, with smooth animations which accurately capture the movements of real cricketers. The sound effects also help to promote the realism of the game with some excellent sound samples of crowd noises and the sound of bat striking ball.

Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket is an excellent sports sim with some great gameplay and sexy graphics. The inclusion of a two-player option means you can have great fun taking on other cricketing buffs in your family on other cricketing buffs in your family when England are seconds away from victory and rain stops play yet again.

1. Realistic animation, customisable teams and waggling action makes this a winner.

1. You're given little info about the players. An editable statistics screen would have been a good idea.