I’m lumping these two games together as they are both by the same author and very similar to each other. They are freeware available from https://cricket.marcardar.com.
They are described as cricket management games but there is a little bit of an action element as you get to decide when to run as well. The management options are fairly limited. Basically picking the team, order of batsmen (usually a formality), picking bowlers, and selecting field positions. There are game highlights with very basic graphics showing boundaries, wickets and the like. The whole thing reminds me very much of Football Manager on the Spectrum which I spent hours on as a kid.
I spent most time with Sticky Wicket which I enjoyed initially but less so as time went on. The fielding sections work well enough but it seems to be impossible to get realistic totals on the batting sections. I’d not have done anything wrong and have about 5 runs after 10 overs. I’m highly suspicious that the randomness is affected by the machine speed. I did far better batting in my first game on a PII before swapping to a 286 and I hadn’t even figured out that you could press r to run. The game constantly switches graphics mode which on my VGA CRT meant that by the time the monitor had swapped modes, the action could be half over. On an EGA monitor, I didn’t have that issue.
They are interesting shareware games anyway. The source code is available on github. I expect the best way to win would be to examine that, see how the equations work and play accordingly. I’ve had my fill of them at this point though so I’ll leave that for someone else and will be glad to move on to the next game.
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