There's a lot wrong with cricket. For a start, there's the fact that it was used by the English to try to stamp their culture on the nations that were 'colonised' (i.e. invaded) during the building of the British Empire. For a middle bit, there's the sheer folly of the English devising a game that a bit of rainfall can put a stop to (rain in England, that's a rare occurrence, eh?) For a finish, it's just plain dull. That's not to say that it's no good, it's just that each contest is so lengthy, so laid back, so stop-start, that it's all terribly uninvolving. Basically, cricket is ideal entertainment for when it's too hot to concentrate, and that's it.

So how do you transfer a game like this to a computer, short of including a sun lamp and a bag of oranges in the package? Well, you could throw in a few gimmicks, such as digitised speech. This could be made extra gimmicky by having phrases like 'no ball' and 'out' delivered in a broad American accent. (Yeah, like find me an American who knows what a 'no ball' is.) You could then add some nice icon-ed up menu screens, and some bright and cheery graphics. And then you could... er... well, you could try to make the control method really simple to give it a fun arcadey feel. Whoops.

Cutting down on the controls makes the game easier to get into, yeah, but it also makes things really limiting. Your batsman, for instance, can only hit the ball in two ways; to the left or to the right. (The trajectory of the ball seems to depend more on how it's bowled than how you hit it.) The fielding is equally clumsy - point the joystick to where the ball is heading and the bloke nearest to that spot will wander off to collect. On collection, hit fire to throw it to the wicket keeper/bowler.

And that's it - gameplay that's 60 percent routine, 35 perfect luck and (at best) 5 percent skill. There must be some way of getting cricket to work as a computer game, but it's going to need a completely new approach. A few pretty pictures and some sampled speech just ain't enough.

Like most sports sims, this one livens up a great deal when two human players are involved. It's possibly of interest to ardent (and undemanding) fans of the sport. Computer cricket is a sad idea though, and this does very little to cheer it up.