Ahhhhh, summer... Where would we be without it? (Erm, in perpetual winter? Ed.) Clear blue skies, sunshine, warm weather, everyone with a smile on their face... you can't beat it. Sunbathing in the park, saxophone player in the background, heaven. Then you're shaken back to reality when a nearby cricket game sends a ball at a gazillion miles an hour in your direction which you can either catch in your teeth, or duck. Then you remember that you're actually a fielder who's not meant to be lying around picking daisies, although the difference between the two I've never actually figured out to my satisfaction.
    Cricket is a dull game to play. When your team is batting, you're waiting an age in the pavilion until it's your turn, and when you get to bat, you have to face someone chucking balls at you at the aforementioned gazillion miles an hour, hoping against hope that the ball connects with your bat and not, like on one of my less fortunate days, with your nose. Unless you're good, you're out very quickly, and it's back to the pavilion for tea and scones, or something. Fielding is even worse if you can't bowl. You stand in the middle of nowhere and occasionally get to see some action coming your way, and even though few things happen in your area, you still have to stay sharp just in case they do. Cricket would be vastly improved if you could do all the batting and bowling you liked, and this is where Grandslam's International Cricket comes into play.
    This is a fully featured cricket sim. After listening to the fab intro tune, you have a choice between Test and One-Day matches, five different opponents, a choice of five grounds to play in, each with different properties which suit different types of bowler, and you even have different types of weather when you're playing a Test Match. Once you've chosen your team from the England squad of the time (no licencing agreements back then, so you can pick players like Botham and Gower without them wanting royalties from Grandslam - those were the days when the gaming world wasn't ruled by money... sigh...), it's time to toss the coin and decide who goes into bat first.
    Batting is fun. You have a view from behind the bowler's shoulder and see him wind up and throw. You have five different strokes available, four offensive, one defensive. Hit the ball squarely and it rolls safely along the ground, mistime it and the ball flies up into the air ready for catching. Providing you haven't been clean-bowled, the screen flips to an overhead view of the whole field which shows you where the ball's heading. Pressing the fire button gets you to run. Boundaries are commonplace, but it is impossible to hit a six, although you can run six runs if you time it right and have luck on your side. The fielder fetches the ball and throws it at the stumps with razor-sharp accuracy, so make sure you're in before it reaches them!
    Bowling and fielding is a bit more sedate, just like in the real game, but it's still pretty swish. Choose a type of bowler (fast, slow, medium, etc), then bowl at the opponent's batsman, pressing fire at the top of the throw. Time it right and it goes right down the middle straight towards the stumps. Hit fire too early or late, and the ball swings left and right respectively, and the computer usually has a swipe at it. Once the ball is hit, the screen again flips to the overhead view and your nearest fielder to the ball is highlighted. You can either field the ball with this man, or press fire to change to someone else. In fact, I recommend you press fire straightaway anyway so you can see what's happening, which way the ball is going, and which man is the one who should be handling this shot. You can catch the ball if the strength of it is low enough, and the height is less than ten feet, otherwise you have to chase it until it's within reach and then automatically thrown at one of the stumps.
    This is a top game. All cricket rules are followed, and Grandslam have made a lot of effort in making this as authentic as possible. Unfortunately, the gameplay is flawed, but in a nice way. After playing it for yonks, you begin to notice various patterns in where the computer hits the ball in the field, and you end up moving your fielders into formations that just wouldn't be effective in the real game, but in Inty Cricket they'd field everything more or less automatically. After a while, bowling is a cinch to do as well as you get the timing so perfect that it's difficult not to throw it straight at the stumps. This means that the batsman is either forced to defend and score nothing, or mishit it up into the air ready for an easy catch. If you're lucky he'll even play the wrong stroke so that you either clean-bowl him or get him LBW.
    These are only minor flaws, though, and ones which won't become apparent until you've played the game to death (which you will because it's so damn good), and they definitely shouldn't stop you enjoying it for weeks on end.
    Grandslam were originally going to give this a full release - I remember getting some blurb from them before it was put on YS listing it as one of their releases for 1988, and I'm not sure why it wasn't released. The game admittedly could have been a bit more polished, and I think it's written in half BASIC, half machine code. When you're batting there's a line at the bottom of the screen telling you who's bowling to who, and the batsman's score - if this line gets too long, you get the "scroll?" message at the bottom of the screen, just like in BASIC programs. The game's loader is also a bit on the bog standard side, with the loading screen being overwritten by the name of the data block that's loaded right after it. But ignore those niggles and you're in for a really good game.