Worthplaying reports:
''There's something absolutely magical about college football season. Every Saturday afternoon during the fall months, dorms empty, alumni load into their cars, and the marching band struts its stuff to bring the whole campus together in a celebration of one of America's most beloved sports. While great professional football teams can pull in 60,000 to 80,000 fans on a given week, the elite teams of college football routinely seat over 100,000 partisans, making the big rivalry game an event that every fan should experience at least once in his or her life. This year, NCAA Football 09 is more about the emotion and pageantry than ever, and the result is one terrific game.
Over the years, the NCAA Football and Madden franchises have had their ups and downs when it comes to gameplay, and thankfully this year, at least the collegiate version has done things right. Perhaps the biggest improvement is in your attempts to elude defenders, which is now much easier than in years past. Most actions are now mapped to the right thumbstick (though some staples, like spins and dives, are still comfortably ensconced on the face buttons), allowing you to quickly and easily juke and shuck defenders and leave them in your wake. Furthermore, moves can be strung together now, so you can juke into a spin with ease and further befuddle would-be tacklers.
Another great improvement is the role of composure of players, particularly the quarterback. Fans of the game know that college football is all about emotion, and the rowdy crowds that populate most stadiums are enough to wear on nearly any young man's nerves. Quarterbacks in the game are especially rattled by the crowd, as can be seen before the snap. If you pull up the play chart when a QB has lost his composure, the receiver's routes will appear as wavy lines, if they even show the correct routes at all. A solid performance will calm the gunslinger, and once he's calmed down, everything shows up as it normally would, and his performance steadies. However, if the quarterback is struggling and his composure continues to plummet, he will continually make bad passes and poor judgments, possibly even to the point that you have to bench him and let someone else give it a try.''
As GamePolitics has reported, Electronic Arts may soon face a lawsuit by retired NFL players who believe their likenesses were unlawfully incorporated into EA's best-selling Madden game. But former college players now want their slice of EA's money pie as well.
SF Weekly reports that a one-time college quarterback is now making the same claim as NFL retirees in regard to EA's popular NCAA Football and NCAA Basketball franchises. Samuel Keller (left), formerly of Arizona State and Nebraska, is the lead plaintiff in the class action suit.
But College athletes aren't allowed to be payed. A roster download is done by third parties, and merely makes renaming every player in the game much, much quicker. Which is what many gamers will do anyway.
And the players aren't always right anyway. Austin English (#33) from OU is black in NCAA 2008, but is clearly white in real life.
I don't know what he wants EA to do, they aren't allowed to pay the players, and gamers want to play as the players. It's a lose-lose.
The NCAA Football 09 $1,000,000 Challenge, sponsored by House-Kidder Entertainment, is a new nationwide Tournament that will allow U.S. video gamers to compete using the NCAA Football 09 video game on the Xbox 360 for a Grand Prize that could be as much as $1,000,000.
Operation Sports' Wil McCombs examines NCAA Football 09's recruiting model and gives suggestions on how to improve it for NCAA Football 10.
Excerpt: "The main system 'improvements' in '09 were, in my opinion, aimed in the wrong direction. Last year, EA developers presented gamers with ways to streamline the process via features like Quick Call and CPU assistance. Sadly, many sports games -- particularly EA Sports games -- yearn for the casual gamer, and these new tweaks made it nauseatingly evident. Considering the over-the-top, hardcore nature of most college football fans (and NCAA gamers), it seems counter-productive to dumb down the product for the masses, at least in this department."
