Ashes Cricket 2013 game pulled out of market

In an almost unprecedented move, 505 Games decided to pull out Ashes Cricket 2013 on November 28, 2013. Abhishek Mukherjee writes about why the worst cricket game ever created had to be taken off from the market.

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It’s not always that games are withdrawn from the market after its release. Coinciding its launch with the 2013-14 Ashes in Australia, 505 Games’ Ashes Cricket 2013 (released for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii) was all set to become the most popular cricket game in recent times. What turned out was a disaster that would make even the most ignorant followers of the game laugh out loud.

Cricketers fell off randomly, threw and overthrew needlessly, and the batsmen kept running endlessly. As a result, runs kept on piling, turning the entire thing into a farce. It is one thing to master a game (as fans often did with the EA Sports releases or the different versions of Brian Lara Cricket); it’s another thing to roll in laughter while doing so.

It did not stop at that. The graphics were completely outdated, the characters resembled no known cricketer (despite receiving full rights from Cricket Australia and the England and Wales Cricket Board), and the erratic, random controls often went haywire.

James Vincent wrote in The Independent that “fans have described Ashes [Cricket] 2013, which was released on 22 November for PCs, as ‘incomplete’, ‘a pile of garbage’ and ‘flawed in almost every way’.” The fans also called the graphics “from 1999” and trashed the game, calling the creators have a “complete lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the sport”.

FirstPost wrote about the game: “The graphics are third-rate – at times the players run around in confusion, at times they dance (when they are not supposed to be doing it), then the ball simply teleports into the wicket-keeper’s gloves, the ‘keeper never bends to collect the ball, the crowd is made up of Lego-like structures, the bowling is too easy, the squads are not updated.”

The game was to be released earlier in July, during the Ashes in England but the creators held it back on the ground that the game was still not “worthy of the Ashes name”.

505 Games later apologised in an interview to Video Gamer: “505 Games announce today the cancellation of Ashes Cricket 2013. The game was released briefly on Friday 22nd November 2013 on digital PC portal, Steam, but has since been removed by 505 Games following negative consumer feedback.”

Thankfully for purchasers all over the world, 505 Games has announced that it will provide a full refund to the purchasers of the game. They can at least wait for Tru Blu Entertainment’s Don Bradman Cricket 14 to come out. And of course, there is always International Cricket Captain to fall back on.

(Abhishek Mukherjee is a cricket historian and Senior Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He generally looks upon life as a journey involving two components – cricket and literature – though not as disjoint elements. A passionate follower of the history of the sport with an insatiable appetite for trivia and anecdotes, he has also a steady love affair with the incredible assortment of numbers that cricket has to offer. He also thinks he can bowl decent leg-breaks in street cricket, and blogs at http://ovshake.blogspot.in. He can be followed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ovshake42)