Ashes Cricket 2009

After playing a couple of innings of an Ashes test, batting and bowling depth is certainly intimated, and will probably take time to master. Pacing, like the Lara series, will likely divide opinion. It does require you to think "cricket" rather than "videogame": bowling demands patience and application; batsmen, particularly high up the order, need wearing down.

A loose ball flung down in frustration is easily belted to the boundary. And if you go in trying to slog every ball for six, your team will collapse faster than England's real middle-order. A solid innings, it seems, must be ground out. Which should really be the point.

For Wii owners, the big excitement is in having a dedicated cricket game in the first place. While many, on picking up the Wiimote for the first time, thought "lightsaber!", "Harry Potter wand!", or "terrible third-party mini-game collection!", others dared to dream of virtual leather on plastic willow.

First the bad news. Ashes Cricket 2009 on Wii, developed by Gusto Games in the UK, is not MotionPlus-compatible. For this year at least. The game was already underway before Nintendo's accessory emerged, I'm told, and so the team ruled it out. "It needs to be handled carefully," says producer Jamie Firth. "Just bolting it on would be a waste".

Also, nope, you don't use the Wiimote exactly as you would a cricket bat, as the game adopts the same TV-style viewpoint of the HD version. (Incidentally, the team toyed around with including a first-person mode on the HD platforms, but canned the idea because it believed it would be a lousy gameplay experience).

Instead, it takes a "layered" approach to batting, since Codemasters sees this as the version it wants dads to be able to play with their sons without getting in a confused flap. So swishing the controller at the right moment strikes the ball perfectly well by itself. Direction and shot selection options are then added by using the nunchuk and buttons in combination.

On the demo machine at the Oval, KP, true to form - and defying the injury that rules him out of the series the very next day - has already mastered the batting, and shows off by smashing six after six. Shame you couldn't do that in the first two Tests, eh?

But bowling does allow you to go through the full motion should you wish, since you're already looking over the bowler's shoulder. Or for the bone idle, a stiff flick forwards does the trick. Again, there are layers of depth here: rotating the controller in either direction applies spin, for instance. And one lovely touch is shining the ball by rubbing the Wiimote against your leg, which Codemasters says has the palpable benefit of delivering more swing.

Wii is strictly offline, but does boast four-player local multiplayer, which sounds like a good lark, though I haven't tried it. Both versions also include a scenario mode to boost single-player longevity, dumping you in any number of tense situations to slog and hurl your way out of.

As I write, on day one of the third Test, the series is in that thrillingly clichéd "finely poised" and "too close to call" phase - much to the delight of Codemasters. Whatever happens at Edgbaston - piss it down, I expect - when the game hits next Friday, "everything is still to play for", with the turmoil of Cardiff and Lord's recapturing the excitement of 2005 and thrusting cricket back into the spotlight with last-ditch drama, individual heroics, and the infinite joy of seeing Ricky Ponting play onto his own wicket.

So Ashes Cricket 2009 has our attention as it strolls out to the crease. But can it produce a truly memorable innings? We'll let you know very soon.