Brian Lara Cricket 99 vs. EA Sports Cricket 2004

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1. Graphics: Cricket 2004 graphics are understandably superior to BLC considering that it was released in 2004 compared to BLC released in 1998-99. The graphics comes at a price though, high system requirements.
   
2. System Requirements: Again like graphics, there is simply no comparison. While almost any machine of today running a compatible OS will run BLC, Cricket 2004 needs a potent machine.

   Minimum System Requirements
   Parameter	Cricket 2004	Brian Lara Cricket
   Operating System	Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP	Windows 95 or 98 (does not run in Win2k/XP)
   Processor	Pentium 3 500MHz	Pentium 166 Mhz plus 3D card or Pentium 200 Mhz without 3D card
   Memory (RAM)	64MB (128MB Required for Windows 2000/XP)	16MB (32MB recommended)
   Video Card	32MB Direct3D Video Card with DirectX 8.1 Compatible drivers	SVGA 4MB card
   Hard Disk Free Space	1050MB	95MB
   DirectX	8.1	6.0

3. Sounds: Commentary in Cricket 2004 maybe more in quantity than BLC but in the end it fails as miserably just as BLC commentary did. It is repetitive, annoying and irrelevant. C2K4 maybe holds a very minor edge in commentary. In game sounds are as horrible in C2k4 as in BLC. It completely fails to recreate the pressure cooker atmosphere of actual matches and it is most annoying to hear people clapping to cheer a boundary, as if you are playing a lawn tennis match. Again C2K4 maybe holds a very minor edge but not much separates the two games.
   
4. Batting: C2k4 is a clear winner with much better  batting aspect than BLC. Let's see how.
   1. There are 3 main classes of batting controls in a cricket simulation. First a the stance button, i.e. front-foot or back-foot. Second, the power button, i.e. one resulting in an aerial shot. Third, the direction of the shot, i.e. the 8 keypad buttons. 
   2. Stance Button: BLC has only one. The kind of shot produced, i.e. front-foot or back-foot is automatically decided by the computer depending on the length of the ball. In C2k4, there is a front-foot button, a back-foot button and a charging down the pitch button. This means your choice of shots is not handicapped or limited. You can try and improvise or play silly shots or play any shot you like to. It's completely upto you for example, whether against a bouncer you swing your bat wildly  on the front-foot or play it more effectively at back-foot :)
   3. Both C2k4 and BLC have a power boost button to play an aerial shot. However, BLC has slog mode as well, which when turned on, changes the game (for both teams) into a slogging contest (all shots are aerial). It's a fun addition to the game, adding to it's playability and shelf-life. This feature is absent in C2k4.
   4. Both C2k4 and BLC give the ability to direct shots in 8 different directions. No difference here.
      
5. Bowling: Frankly, I cannot comment on this since I have almost never bowled in either BLC or C2K4. But the Autoplay option (used to skip a portion of the game and automatically generate a probable score based on some inbuilt formulae) produces better results in C2K4. In my opinion, the Autoplay result is better in C2K4 because the CPU teams post better (higher) scores in C2K4 Autoplay compared to BLC Autoplay.
   
6. Stats Tracking: One area where C2K4 fails miserably against BLC. While BLC tracks the careers of every individual player throughout the game beautifully, C2K4 doesn't. Even when C2k4 tries some rudimentary form of stats tracking by tracking Team statistics, it fails completely due to huge holes in the form of bugs. It can be safely said thatC2K4 has no stats tracking worth mentioning.
   
7. AI: C2K4 has some basic levels of AI, albeit nothing great. For instance if you hit through an area again and again and again and again (that's right, lots of times through the same area) the area will be secured by the opposite captain. Similarly the   fielding will be more aggressive against a newcomer batsman than a settled one. When the computer is chasing he will make a 'feeble' attempt to pace his innings according to the required run-rates. Still, all this is missing in BLC.
   
8. Fielding: Much better in C2k4. Fielders jump, dive and throw their bodies around to produce stunning catches and run savers. At the same time there is an element of realism and they are not super-humans. They make mistakes, fumble catches, misfield, and throw off target (i.e. not always zeroed in on the  stumps). BLC has some diving fielders, but seen rarely. No ground fielding mistakes in BLC.
   
9. No/wide balls: BLC had no no-ball/wide ball concept (though a patch claimed to fix wide-ball, it was far from satisfactory). C2K4 has both overstepping and over the waist height no-ball (but computer bowler never ever does overstep and height no-balls are signaled/marked as wide instead).
   
10. Batman Settling Down: Couldn't think of a better title for this. Simply put it means, longer your batsman stays on the crease, better he plays. This is perhaps C2K4 strongest point of all and their confidence meter thing is a real innovation. It is a sort of bar on the top of the screen showing how confident your batsman is. If he hits well timed shots and boundaries, this bar will fill up. If he plays mistimed shots or gets hit by a ball, his confidence plummets, he will start playing poorly and you will have to patiently rebuild his confidence. BLC had a similar concept but there was no visual indicator for this. Similarly in BLC, once you reached a confidence there was no scope for him losing the confidence.
    
11. Fatigue: No such characteristic in BLC. In C2K4 bowlers do fatigue and start bowling poorly if you make them bowl too long spells (though the visual meter for this does not work properly and you have to make guess about fatigue status of the bowler).
    
12. Player Attributes: In BLC, how well a player plays was basically dependant on a very simple system of his batting or bowling average. It is very different in C2K4 where every player has well defined attributes like his front foot ability, back foot ability, against spin, against seam etc. Also there are special talents like defensive wall for a batsman (like Rahul Dravid), One Day Expert for Tendulkar), Workhorse (for bowlers like Anil Kumble which means they can bowl real long spells in tests without tiring).
    
13. Player Editor: BLC had no inbuilt/official player editor (though there were external, fan-made tools for this). C2K4 has an inbuilt player editor where you can choose the face, hairs, height, built etc. of a player from a set of predefined types. You can also change payer abilities by allotting points to every ability of the player. But the problem is that there is no limit. You can allot full points to every ability and get a super-human player which kind of takes the fun out of player modeling.
    
14. Rain: BLC had no rain feature. There was a cheat which enabled rain in test matches but then, it never stopped. In all probability, the rain feature was removed from the final release of the game because the developers could not handle it. C2k4 claims to have fully realistic rain feature but that is far from the truth. It never rains in one day games in C2k4. In test games there is rain on a probability based system. But this feature is not perfect. Firstly, some users have reported that once the rain starts, it refuses to stop. Nothing at all happens in the game, the in-game clock stops advancing and you can see continuous rain animation and sounds, but the game never resumes. Secondly, even if the games does resume, there is no difference on the playing conditions except the loss of time (if any) no wet outfield, no soggy balls.
    
15. Finishing: C2K4 is horrible. The problem is that it promised much too much than it could deliver in time. A rushed product that in all probability never saw QA! It has bugs the size of Godzilla and in numbers of locusts. BLC, it never made any huge promises. So you will sometimes feel hugely frustrated by C2K4 even though if you add up all the features, there would be much more in C2K4 than in BLC. EA Sports-HB Studios are not even releasing a patch for the game so you can understand their commitment.

All in all if you have a computer capable enough to play C2K4 I'd recommend it over BLC. Despite its huge shortcomings it is  the best Cricket simulation in the gaming scene today simply because there is no competition (unfortunately).

Atul Singh
Updated July 2004