Le Cordon Bleu to Chef Boyardee: EA has transformed NCAA football from a masterpiece to an utter disaster.
What's missing from previous versions?
Create-a-team, create-a-player, actual referees (now you just get a fake coin at the initial toss, and a listing of the penalties), cheerleaders/cannons, my mascot, weaker NCAA teams (D1AA) and historic teams, the momentum system, co-op play, and so on.
This is not an insignificant list of omissions. Madden and especially NCAA have always been about the little things. Recent versions have been so great, because of the attention to detail. There were almost limitless possibilities to what you could create, think up, and do in the game. In comparison, this year's version is much more basic. Yeah you've got your basic game play and a few additions here and there to dynasty and campus legend, but the best parts of the game are all gone.
Any other problems with the game?
In short, yes. I found the play selection screen in this version to be quite poorly designed. In previous versions, finding the right play was always a breeze, but you now have to navigate a convoluted maze. The rate of turnovers in this game is also a major problem. Way too often does a perfectly good throw result in a pick, and too often does a running back with good hands fumble the ball on a run. Don't even think about throwing bomb passes, they'll be picked. Also, the player movements in this game are oddly jerky. In previous versions, movements were always fluid, now they are quite strange.
There are also some issues with sluggish menus and a general under-use of the PS3's processing power. Basically, EA failed to properly design this game for the PS3, so to pump it out in time for release, the video quality took a hit. What's with the kick meter and some of the play diagrams? They look like they were drawn up in MS Paint. I mean seriously, come on EA.
This is just a bad game; I feel cheated out of my money. The NCAA series has a great history of terrific game play and rich features, but that all went away this year. EA always pumps out a version every year, so to get this one out for the PS2, they severely cut corners, leaving out some of the best aspects of the game, and releasing a generally unsatisfactory product. With other studios releasing fantastic games for the PS3 now, this is a big reality check of what EA really is. Past NCAAs were nothing more than year after year of recycled games with a few additional features each year. By the end of the run on the PS2, the games were quite fantastic because of the sheer volume of releases, but with this total redesign, we lost all of those features. EA better make serious improvements in next year's game, or I will not purchase it. This is such a letdown to a longtime NCAA fanatic.