The PSP once again shows that it's the perfect portable platform for sports management games.
International Cricket Captain by Empire Interactive has enjoyed a long and successful run on the PC, winning fans for the depth of the database, the knowledge of the team working on it and the way that it falls just the right side of the luck/skill border. It's also a game I personally never expected to find it's way onto the PSP as it seemed perfectly suited to the PC, especially as this year's incarnation introduced a whole new 3D highlights engine meaning more power required and a higher graphics engine needed. So as with Football Manager it's somewhat of a minor miracle that the game has been squished down onto the PSP with a surprisingly small loss of features.
The game has also made nods to the concept of short burst portable gaming with options of one off 20/20 matches alongside one day games, tests and customisable series alongside the two FULL season modes - firstly the "captain county AND country" mode and secondly, and my preference - "captain county and earn the right to country" mode. Afterall, if you're going to play a game you've got to play it properly right!
My season began with a choice of my name, difficulty (normal or, booo, easy) and then turning off the menu music which while being the classic "BBC Test Match Special" cricket theme, gets repetitive quickly. Still it allowed me a bit of a boogie when it first played. I then chose one of the first class county teams (Kent of course as my home county) and the nationality that I was proving myself to captain (South Africa). The database of non-English national players seems much improved from previous seasons.
I was then let loose on my squad and given all the usual PC options to look at club and player records, averages, histories of players, preferences etc. This is one complete database and the control system employed to move around it is easily on par with Football Manager - namely that it takes a little while to get used to but once you've got it, it becomes second nature. As with past cricket captain's you can chooise which players to coach, to physio, to sign at the start of the season and have the use of your wiley groundsman to cunningly prepare your pitch to your best advantage.
So into the match itself and everything is there as it should be - if bowling you can choose your bowler, change his line, length, aggression, fielding set-up (not quite as deep as the PC version but decent nonetheless) and if batting your aggression, whether to match bowler aggression, whether to farm the strike and if to move players up the batting order in game. With a single touch of the L or R buttons you can also check on scorecards, bowling stats, batting stats etc. Also the in-game menu allows for checking up on player information, saving, loading and such like. You can also chooe to be as involved as you want, either playing an over at a time, or changing the bowling approach after every ball. Everything present and correct.
Somehow they've also managed to squeeze in the attractive 3D match highlights and Jonathan Agnew's soundbite "commentary" which are both very good touches for a portable game.
All in all a fine game which seems to only have a couple of problems - mainly it seems a ramp up in difficulty which pushes it to the "hard" end of the spectrum, but then most of us would prefer a game that is too hard to one that is too easy. So a success for Empire and a game that will no doubt find a small band of followers amongst all three of us cricket management loving UK-based PSP owners.