International Cricket 2010

The tutorials are "locked". You must complete one stage to move on to the next. Your reward for completing the batting tutorial (i.e. batting for five overs without losing your wicket and demonstrating to the AI you have reached a level of "confidence") is access to the advanced batting tutorial and a chance to play in new stadia, unlocked by your progress.

Learning curves are steep and daunting, but then again, learning to play Cricket itself can be as easy as climbing a thorn tree with an armload of eels. It is a capricious game with no respect for reputations: ask the great Sir Don Bradman, who needed one run to retire with an average of 100 in his last Test Match and found himself bowled out for a duck by a man from Birmingham.

Armed with everything you have learnt from these demanding tutorials, you move on to the matches themselves: all the options are there. One Day Internationals, 20/20, Test Matches and a Codemasters invention: a tournament called "Round Robins".

A packed Lord's saw your correspondent, playing as England, lose to Australia in a 20/20 floodlit game. Jonathan Agnew and Shane Warne provided the often inappropriate commentary. Inevitable, I suppose, in a computer game.

OK, so I am an old git who has not got his head round the 20/20 format yet (even on the Xbox), so let's give the five-day game a whirl. As a friend once said to me: "The difference between 20/20 and a five-day Test Match is the difference between a passionate five-day love affair in a country hotel with good food, fine wine and great sex, and a quickie in a darker corner of the pub car park at chucking out time after six pints of Old Jake's Bumburning Bitter."

I am offered an unlikely number of home and away teams: Do I really want Bermuda to play Canada for five days? The stadia on offer are perhaps a little less comprehensive; Codemasters just couldn't see their way clear to realising Toronto Cricket Ground for the great unwashed. This is a pity, as it would have been great to see the sightscreen moved around by tethered elks or moose and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police patrolling the boundary.

I finally opt for India to play Bangladesh in Kolkata for five days. I am asked if I wish to "edit" the team. This proves a mighty difficult task. Tendulkar has been replaced by a new player called Tenhukkar, Sehwag by Sehwak and so on. Clearly, Sachin and the boys knew what their names were worth and it was too much for Codemasters. Somehow, our poor impoverished English and Australian cricketers managed to agree a price with Codemasters and allow their real names to be used.

India get off to a fine start but, again, the same old ennui that I experienced in the 20/20 game finally gnaws away at my resolve: I want to be out there playing the real thing, not literally "twiddling my thumbs".