Graham Gooch's All Star Cricket

Cricket sits outside most Central European players' experience, but in 1980s British software it was a standard sports genre with a dependable audience. Audiogenic was one of the houses that specialised in cricket simulations, and putting an international player's name on the box was ordinary marketing practice at the time - the same logic that attached football stars to football games.

This 1987 Commodore 64 release uses a side view, which for cricket means you watch the bowler and the batsman at the moment that decides everything. The whole sport compresses into the short interval between delivery and stroke: read the type of ball, choose the shot, then judge whether a run is worth attempting. That rhythm makes a cricket simulation a game about patience and judgement rather than reflexes, which is unusual among 8-bit sports titles.

Representing the sport on this hardware imposed limits. The field can only be shown in sections, the number of on-screen figures is small, and the fielders operate on simple logic. On the other hand, cricket lives in tables and numbers, and statistics cost almost no memory - which is why the format suited 8-bit machines better than you might expect.

You can launch the game in your browser here, so trying it takes no setup even if you do not know the rules; a few overs of patient experimentation will convey the basics. Players who do know cricket will appreciate how early the home computer scene managed to translate a slow tactical sport into a working digital form. Newcomers should expect the opening minutes to be genuinely confusing until the terminology clicks.