What more can you say? It looks quite superb... just like watching TV

Summer is with us and that carnival of Cricket, the World Cup, is here too. What better excuse do you need to take an early lunch, pull on your joy pads and entertain a packed, shirt-sleeved crowd with a glorious innings on your PC?
Gideon Kibblewhite

Lords yes, cricket fans, no longer do you have to troop to your local playing field for a mellow but competitive session of leather on willow, only to be rained off. Neither must you get your pristine whites dirty, because EA Sports have given us a PC version of the game to be proud of - and just in time for the greatest one-day tournament on the globe.

Cricket World Cup '99 has everything you could reasonably wish for: the dry, soft Aussie lilt of Richie Benaud in the commentary box, and alongside him, the still cherubic David Gower; all 12 of the planet's best cricket teams currently battling for the right to be called World Champions; a host of quite beautiful tournament grounds and lastly, and by no means twelfth man, a thorough and realistic simulation of the game. And you've even got nets to practise in, should you care to.

We'll wager that most of you won't want to bother with net practice though - and fortuitously, it's dead easy to get stuck straight into a one-day international. In fact the front end of the game is a fine example of how simple an options menus should be to use. You just click on a game type (practice, one day-er, world cup, super six tournament), click on a team and a ground, pick your weapon (the mouse is the bat of choice) and you're away and calling the toss.

It's an extremely difficult task to translate the 'feel', 'whip' and 'purchase' of batting and bowling into a computer game, and many in the past have failed miserably at it. CWC, however, does a decent job of making you feel involved without making things overly complicated.