Best of the series to date.
User Rating: 9.1 | NCAA Football 06 PS2
Over the years EA's NCAA football franchise has been one of the best sports games out there. Not every single season has managed to improve upon the previous year however. Last year's incarnation was not as good as the 2004. However, the 2006 installement takes all of the advancements from the last few years including the matchup stick, home field advantage, discipline, and Dynasty feature improvements to make it the best version yet. Some of the features 2005 did introduce included the matchup stick and home field advantage. Both of these were well received and added some nice "extra" options to add to the already deep gameplay. While the home field advantage still needs to be tweaked to make it more or less effective depending on the stadium and situations it is a cool aspect of playing big games at home or on the road. Its also nice to be able to turn off the rumble feature of this option. The matchup stick is one that I dont use a lot, but it is cool every once in a while to check out the scared young CB going up against that senior star WR. One thing the 2005 installment did not do was improve upon the presentation of the game. No graphical improvements, the VO's were exactly the same, all of the menu designs were similar. The 2006 version really does a nice job of updating everything. The menus and interface frames are all new, they added some cool shots of Nessler, Corso and Herbstreit behind the Gameday desk at whatever field they may be during the week. They also show Corso donning the mascot mask he thinks will win. The graphics are still amazing and perhaps slightly improved. The stadiums are all updated, at least the ones I have seen. The weather effects are a little more realistic. All of the uniform options seem to be updated as well. The VO's are basically the same, but some new patterns have been added. Another new feature is the music. You can select either the traditional fight song music from your fave team, or you get a mix of 90's based alt. rock and hip hop. Its pretty cool to be able to changeup, as even your team's fight song gets old after hearing it for the 1000th time. These songs also play during all of the menu screeans which provides nice atmosphere as you sit through loading times, etc. One of the big new features of this game is the Race for the Heisman. Normally EA chooses the big stud from that year's NL draft for the cover. This season they chose Desmond Howard, who might be the poster boy for Heisman poses. Basically, you create a player, run through some spring drills to impress the coaches, get some major offers or just walk on to school of your choice, and then you get 4 years to win the Heisman with that player. Pretty cool diversion from the real meat of the game which is Dynasty mode. In this mode the main interface area is your dorm room. Here you get to check the schedule, see trophies, compare your stats, look at pics of your girlfriend (which get better looking as yoru player does better), and you also can check your Heisman hype meter. You even get to read fan mail from various fans, which are mostly stupid. Overall, this mode is a nice replacement for the stale Classics challenge in previous games. Of course everyone plays NCAA for Dynasty Mode. Its back and it contains a few new features. The biggest and best is the in season recruiting. Now you can spend points on blue chip recruits that you target before the season starts. Fill those key need positions before the end of the year. Basically you select the targets you want to go after, assign points to them and check to see how you are doing each week. After the recruits have whittled down their lists, you get some invites where you can make pitches to the recruits to sell them on your program. The only downside is once you lose a recruit as the season goes on, which will be most of them, you cant select new ones. This should be something EA changes for next year. All of your staples are back including the polls, Heisman race, and ability to check out standings. The discipline aspect of Dynasty is back, but thats not a good thing. Once again, while its realistic, it defeats the purpose when 2 or 3 of your key players are gone for academic violations. I dont mind a one game suspension here and there, but losing key players for 3 or 4 games just blows. You add injuries and sometimes you can have 4 or 5 guys out for extended periods. You can turn this feature off though, but I would like to see EA tweak this feature to make it better. The offseason recruiting is better than ever and again makes the offseason fun. The addition of the in season recruiting makes if even easier to fill your needs. Gameplay wise the passing attack has resumed being doable. Last year it was almost impossible to get going with passing the football due to the hot/cold feature they added. Well they have done away with that and it is much easier to pass the football. The running game is still intuitive and they even added the play stick feature from the Madden franchise if you want it. You can also revert to the traditional controller configs if you want. The kicking meter is improved and slightly easier to master, which is good. Kicking has been far to difficult for far to long in this game. The variety of your playbook and schemes are back and you can customize your fave team's playbook to incorporate other teams cool plays. All in all this is again one of the strengths of the game. So overall the game puts together a lot of the better features from previous games, adds a couple of new ones, and ends up being the best installment yet. If you like College Football, and I know you do, this game is for you. Easily worth the $50 price tag.
