I couldn’t even make out when I was controlling the game or when the AI took over. The usual approach of “just start a game, try to hit the ball and see what happens” didn’t work here. After my first try at Brian Lara Cricket ‘96, I was flabbergasted.
When it came to a sports simulator that utterly managed to confound me, I didn’t have to look across the Atlantic – a short glance at a game produced and only released on the virtually neighboring British Isles sufficed. Which goes to show that even if you’re not familiar with a particular sport, you still can draw a lot of enjoyment out of a console simulation of it. Nevertheless, once I figured out what everything meant and how it all tied together, I had a lot of fun with that game. American football though took quite some time figuring out: What’s a “first down?” How does the scoring work? Why can’t I pass the ball whenever I want? What does “fake punt” mean? I think I’d never have tried understanding all of that hadn’t my parents mistakenly gifted a copy of John Madden Football to me one day – they had thought it was a soccer game. Basketball also wasn’t much of a problem, though it took me a few years – and a sports class in high school – to figure out what “goaltending violation” meant – and I don’t know of any basketball game even attempting to simulate a technicality like a “double dribble.” Baseball video games usually boiled down to “just hit the damn ball and hope it’s a home run” for me – a strategy that usually worked surprisingly well. Ice hockey was pretty straightforward, especially when it was possible to ignore offsides.
I must have been eight or nine years old, but I distinctly recall sitting in front of my console, trying out different cartridges and – since I couldn’t speak much English at the time – attempting to figure out the rules of each sport.
Genre: Sports Publisher: Codemasters Developer: Audiogenic Software Players: 1-4 Released: 1996Īs a non-British European, I remember what it was like to encounter a video game simulation of an American sport for the first time.