Theres a lot to like about Bowl Bound College Football. Everything is pretty intuitive and there is a nice email system that serves as a tutorial. The game guides you through the various stages that include a training camp, red shirting freshmen, setting depth charts, and even determining how much study hall time your less book smart students will have to keep their eligibility.
Theres still much work to be done. Playing for only 30 minutes revealed some huge bugs in the game. I chose to coach Navy (known as the Sailers in the game – please fix this before the game is released since I think Grey Dog meant “Sailors”) and set up a flexbone offense. For those of you not familiar with this formation, there isnt a lot of passing within this style of offense. Imagine my shock when Navy played SMU and Navys QB threw for 377 yards with 33 attempts. A flexbone QB might have 377 yards passing in three or four games. There are some wishbone/flexbone AI issues in the demo.
Heres a doozy of an error/bug. Read the following game log entry very closely:
Southern Methodist ball, Q4, 2-2-NAVY2 (10:30) 3-14
Offense: Outside Run, Set: Shotgun, Play: SG-RB-straight-LT (outside run)
Defense: Stop Run, Set: Goal Line, Play: GL-run-Man-B7,8,9 (target run)
RB L. Droughns runs left end for 2 yards ****Touchdown!*****
Southern Methodist ball, Q4, 1-0-NAVY0 (10:02) 9-14
Isaiah Frederickson converts the 21 yard field goal.
Southern Methodist ball, Q4, 1-10-SMU35 (09:44) 12-14
Notice that after the TD, SMU was awarded 3 points for their extra point. This consistently happened throughout the game. Id suggest fixing this before the full version is released.
Dont know if this is a bug or not, but there wasnt much scoring in the game until late during the 4th quarter when SMU scored 22 points and Navy 14 during a five or six minute span during the game.
The demo shows a game with a lot of potential that doesnt quite work yet. But to Grey Dog’s credit, at least we’re not paying full price to be beta testers. I’d go ahead and post any bugs you find in their bug report forum.
