Beware of the Juggernaught
The first thing you have to do before doing anything within the game is select your favorite team. Once that has been done, you will hear your team's fight song on every menu in the game. Cool at first, quite annoying later on. The customization options in the game are quite deep. You can of course create your own team, players, and stadiums. That’s pretty standard. Then you also have to recruit your players. I am sure some college diehards will drool over this option. Me? I put it on auto-recruit. I just don’t care that much. You then have to select your coach’s name. (Does anyone know how to spell Tressel?) The ironic thing here is, you also have the ability to fire your coach and select a new one. Ironic because technically you as the player are the coach. If you don’t like your coach’s performance, then you really shouldn’t be playing the game because you have no one to blame but yourself. I’ve noticed there are a lot of pointless items in this game, such as viewing of fake Sports Illustrated covers and fake weekly news reports. . Does anyone actually care? Finally, after you have gone through all the cool, yet pointless options, it’s time to play.
This game has four levels of competition. Junior-Varsity, Varsity, All-American, and Heisman. I played 1 two minute quarter of each to find my niche. Junior-Varsity is comical. In a two minute quarter I scored three times and had over 100 yards of offense. Not too realistic. Varsity was better, still a bit easy though. All-American on the other hand, was tough. I didn’t even create a first down on this level. And Heisman was comical in the opposite direction of Junior-Varsity. Its so difficult that I doubt I would ever be able to win a game against the console. So looks like my pansy ass will stay with Varsity.
The first thing that comes to mind after starting a game, is the definitive lack of playbook. The game caters your playbook to your team. So using Ohio States playbook, I have about 100 rushing plays and 3 passing plays to choose from. Not very balanced. Give me a playbook with every play in the game and then I will be happy. As far as actually controlling your players, it is pretty standard. It almost seems as though nothing much gameplay wise has changed in the past 5 years. “A” hikes, “A” hands off, corresponding button throws to receivers, etc. One of the new features this game touts is the so called home field advantage. In a nutshell, your controller starts vibrating violently when you are the road team. How this simulates crowd noise, I’m not real sure. I guess they had to add something new to justify the $50.00 price tag.
If you are a diehard college football fan, then this game is for you. You will love all the pointless options and showmanship. If you just want to play a college football game, then go pick up NCAA 2003. Same game, different year, $40 cheaper and no home field advantage. If you are a gamer of my flavor, and play a little bit of everything, then I would suggest staying away from this game. It’s a waste of time.