Pirates crack Ashes Cricket 2009 DRM – The new cricket game from Codemasters

Yay a new Cricket game for the PC! I’ve been waiting for the next installment of EA Cricket 200X series to hit the gaming scene and was surprised to see Ashes Cricket 2009 making its way onto BitTorrent trackers. Although many don’t know, this game was officially released in Australia and Europe on the 7th of August. Ashes Cricket 2009 was developed by Transmission Games and is published by Codemasters. As you can imagine, it’s a cricket simulation game with realistic looking players, animations and core game mechanics - I’ve been able to play the game for a few minutes and at a first glance, it sure looks like fun.

Note that even if the game is titled ‘Ashes’ Cricket 2009, it’s not all about the Ashes test series between Australia and England. All other formats of the game (ODI, T20, etc) are included and there are 12 test playing nations to choose from. Anyways don’t expect too much from the graphics and animations – although they are a lot better than EA’s Cricket 2007, it’s nothing revolutionary. Here is a gameplay video if you want to catch a glimpse of how Ashes Cricket 20009 looks. And note that it isn’t a bug that the player names are incorrectly or weirdly displayed – this is due to licensing. It is also worth mentioning that unlike most recent Cricket simulations, this game hasn’t got crap scores on various review sites. In fact it has scored pretty well in most cases with IGN UK even giving it 8.2 points out of 10 (for the X360 version).

Ashes cricket 2009 has been released for both consoles and for PC. PC version was protected by Securom DRM – or at least it was protected until it met group RELOADED. RELOADED have taken apart the game exe, stripped Securom off it and released it along with a full DVD ISO of the game on scene topsites. The pirated release has has by now leaked into public and private torrent trackers across the world (do not ask for or post torrent links please – this is not a warez blog).

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