The folks at Denki have been very quiet over the last few months. Many saw this as proof positive that the company was sub-contracted to Santa, making toys and games for the good boys and girls of the world. Other, less charitable souls, claimed it was because the company was trying to suppress new that Gary Penn, in-house games boffin, had been bitten by a Christmas zombie.
It turns out neither of those rumours were particularly funny. The company has in fact been working on a brand new game for the iPhone/iPad. Big Cup Cricket is Denki’s take on the world’s most baffling and protracted sport.
Published by Eidos, Big Cup Cricket is, of course, still uniquely Denki. Which means that they’ve looked at making it fun to play, rather than an accurate simulation of the sport itself.
In a suitably enthusiastic and excited tone, Denki’s MD, Colin Anderson, blogged:
So what does he think makes Big Cup Cricket so special then?
“It upholds The End. What we’ve done is successfully dramatise cricket so it’s more accessible to non-cricket fans, while making sure it still feels authentic enough to cricket fans at the same time. It delivers the feeling of playing cricket, without all the boring details getting in the way. It helps you appreciate a lot of the tactics in cricket and how impressive a game it really is. I wasn’t a fan of cricket from a game design perspective when we started the project, but I discovered that a lot of the cleverness of the game gets obscured in the real game. There’s lot of impressive detail in there; it’s very balanced.”
But surely there have been plenty cricket games that deliver that over the years?
“There’s been a number of cricket games that do a decent job of delivering a fun batting game, or a bowling game, or a fielding game, but there’s none that successfully deliver all three together. Cricket’s not just about batting, or bowling, or fielding after all – there’s an alchemy between the three that’s really hard to realise in a video game, and we’ve managed to pull it off.
There you have it then – a brand new Denki Developed game that should be in everyone’s collection. Available on the iTunes App Store right now.
We think Denki is kind of awesome, so it’s more than likely that the game is fun, playable and will produce feelings of enjoyment in even the most cynical and depressive humbugs.
