Cricket Coach Feedback

[gio]

So, the new version of Cricket Coach has been released - www.cricketcoachgame.com free 1 day trial download.

On first impressions, I like it. Results seem to be pretty realistic, interface is good, and the stats all seem fine. Not managed to play a game yet as England manager - loads of county matches to process first it seems.

Anyone else had a go?

[imagine]

have played as AUstralia as usual too good. I had one 300 plus partnership. I cannot get the "unofficial editor"to run.

[Glenn Stiemens]

Glad to see people are enjoying this more than the first ever version...

[gio]

Yeah, international manager as England or Australia would be pretty easy...

I played the first day of the first test V WI. Scored over 300, only lost 4 wickets - pretty realistic really. It seems to me fielders were rather poor. A lot of boundarys that could have been cut off that weren't. But that's a minor point, all in all, it looks good.

[imagine]

overall like it. But time between two matches is too long. Should have continue until next match or next news item. Without this feature i have to click each and every day to continue. The match sim speed is good though.

[Glenn Stiemens]

You can do this - go to your profile and go on holiday until your next match/required action.

[James]

Just downloaded it, and played a quick three match series between New Zealand and England. Very enjoyable, although England won 2-1. How could that happen?

[Pratters]

Originally Posted by James

Just downloaded it, and played a quick three match series between New Zealand and England. Very enjoyable, although England won 2-1. How could that happen?

The person handling New Zealand was making some poor moves surely.

[James]

Originally Posted by Pratyush

The person handling New Zealand was making some poor moves surely.

There's no need to be like that mate

[Neil Pickup]

Just had a crash when I alt-tabbed out & back in of it.

[Hoggy31]

Took so long to load up my first season that I went to lay down and eventually fell asleep.

[Xuhaib]

Lots of Bugs in the BD league.

When playing limited overs, if you bowl second then you have to autoplay the second innings since the game does not let you bowl giving a message that you choose your opening bowlers eventhough they had already been choosen.

Game freezed twice at the end of day's play during a 4-day game, I had to autoplay that day to move further.

Why cant we have more then one slip fielder for a spinner, I know you can but they stand back like as if they are standing for a fast bowler.

[AlexB]

Early impressions are that it's an improvement on 2006: I like that form fluctuates, the GUI is better and the pitch preparation is nice.

A couple of early problems noticed

1. If you sort players by one stat, change the view to another (e.g. sort by age, then view batting ability without resorting), when you view a player from the list and go back, the list is resorted by the batting ability rather than returning to the original order. Just a little annoying having to resort every time.

2. I had a CTD - clicked on the team I was next playing at home to look at their squad, then tried to go back to my squad page, and CTD.

A couple of suggestions

1. Can we have a bit of a longer pause at the end of each over when bowling to make it easier to pause the game to make a bowling change?

2. When choosing next batsman, could we check our player stats from the list rather than having to select someone? It would be useful when getting to know your squad, especially in 1D games for strike rate, etc...

3. More variation in batting abilities against spin and pace would be good - this would lead to batsmen being much more at risk/suited to certain pitches and bowlers.

And a couple of questions:

Is there a player development model - i.e. is it worth picking up a young 40 rated fast bowler in the hope that he will eventually get to world class level, or will he always be rated 40?

Nice to see form changing: will it change if players don't play? In other words, if a player is out of form, will he slowly recover form if he doesn't play 1st XI, or is the only way for him to get better to gut it out in the 1st team? I really hope that it's the former, but that the latter would speed up any upturn if he plays well...

Overall it looks nice, and it's good to see a v2 of this game - still showing a lot of promise.

[AlexB]

Ok - worked out the pause between overs thing. One notch below slow

[AlexB]

However, a major problem - after the CTD, I ticked autosave and started a new game. Just as a back up, before every match and after every day's play I manually saved the game (without existing the programme afterwards).

Played a couple of matches, closed the game down, came back to it and I have two saved games both at 15.4.2007, which is three weeks and two matches before I exited the game. Most annoyingly, I won both the matches as well!

But this is serious: we need to have faith that the save function works...

Edit: Nevertheless, I would stress that the game play does seem much better than 2006, and that I have bought the game - based on last year the updates will be quick & efficient, and the game shows a lot of promise.