Nostalgia can be intoxicating. It can even be disheartening, in that the past can never be reclaimed at least not tangibly. As a young kid playing cricket on the street, in community clubs or in schools, all of us had grandiose cricket dreams to imagine what we would be one day, achieving ultimate greatness in the realms of cricket. Our dreams stretched beyond the limits of our own persons, since cricket is a team sport after all. We would dream about winning tournaments in our own community, joining the big boys in the big leagues, and hoping to decimate them on their own turf. Such were the joys of childhood. However, must we look only to the past to find that solace? We are privileged to have alternate means of imbibing the joys of the cricket experience following our home country teams with an unmatched fervor, feeling like millionaires when they transcend greatness, and terribly depressed when they disappoint us. There is fantasy cricket which allows us to pit our selection wits against the best of them. Different cricket fans have different ways of getting that cricket experience what other means can you think of? There are cricket games of course. PC, Playstation or Xbox, Games have a wonderful ability to enable us to recreate our own reality, putting us right in the midst of the action allowing us to reclaim the emotions that we used to experience when we hit that nasty fast bowler on the street for six, or splintered stumps bowling as fast as we could. The best part games enable you to feel that joy, even if you have never been able to hit the ball beyond the inner circle. Cricket has a proud tradition and legions of fervent supporters. Yet, it doesn't take much to realize, that cricket has been short-changed in that it has never been given that one defining, life-changing game. You only need to look at the example of soccer games to realize the possibilities that exist in creating the ultimate sports virtual reality. Traditional cricket games have tended to put themselves in either the live-action bucket, or the manager bucket and stuck to perfecting it. Yet, there has been something always amiss. Whether it is the pacing of the game, or the lack of control on the game environment (i.e. composition of teams, ability to play a wider variety of teams, team micro-management), or the fact that cricket being a game of high duration can be taxing to play alone for long periods of time. Cricket supporters should certainly not settle for a second-grade experience at least not next to soccer, because we as cricket fanatics believe our sport is indeed the best sport. So cricket fanatics, what features would your ultimate cricket game possess? What kind of game would allow us to relive our glory days playing against our friends, making our team the best in the neighborhood, the village, the town, the city, and then the country. And finally, what would a cricket game look like that would give us complete control over our cricket experience yes, a game that is free even from the messianic presence of Lalit Modi. Cricketers of the world, lets share our thoughts, and get the ball rolling on this cricket revolution. __________________ HowZat! The World's Social Cricket Game http://www.howzat.com
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