I have been participating in a fun discussion over at the digitalsportsgame.com. If you want to read some intelligent, diverse discussion on the game, check out this thread.
|
|
| Whats more delicious? Tori Praver or NCAA Football 09? – © SI.com |
I am biased, but I think my last comments in the thread (check out page 10) were pretty much on the mark, but your mileage may vary:
“In general, I think the game is fun. Warts and all. Hell, I could pick out flaws in any game, it’s just that some of the ones in NCAA Football are glaring. Besides, I am very passionate about college football.
This is a guess, because I am not part of the mass market, casual gamer crowd … at least not yet. I think the focus groups (or whatever EA uses for these types of things) decided that gamers want high scoring games. Focus on offense. Focus on big plays, exciting hits, and high powered offense.
Look at the Madden tournaments as examples of offense out of control. Those games would feature higher scoring if the games featured longer quarters.
The truth is that we, the more niche sports videogame simulation fan, enjoy defense, ball control, running the option, etc. It is not what everyone else wants, so the majority rules. We can only hope that sliders allow us to adjust the game closer to our liking. Big oops this year on the sliders.”
Anyway, the rest of the thread is a good read. Check it out. And yes, I have been looking for an excuse to throw up more eye candy.
I’ve been reading that thread but have only tried the demo, only a couple of times.
To me NCAA has always exhibited the worst aspects of EA football — suction blocking, no defense, useless gimmicks like poise meter, etc.
Maybe if I were a bigger fan of college football, I would be more inclined to at least rent it every year.
But now, I’ve soured on Madden as well and have really ratcheted down my expectations that either series will ever improve or evolve.
However, every year when games come out, people go on a posting binge offering verdicts on the game after less than a week. I’ve been guilty of that as well. But often you find after a couple of months, your initial views change.
Not necessarily because the games have some depth which you continue to discover weeks later. More like when you play human opponents, they get more efficient at exploiting the advantages (not necessarily cheese and not necessarily sim) in certain aspects of the game so you confront evolving strategies.
Being a college football fan does change things a little. While this year’s game is full of bugs, it is much better than last year. If I think back to the “good old days” NCAA Football 2000 and 2001 were the best in the series. Those games were fun, but like this year’s game, they have some of the same problems you mentioned above.