If you are like me, you eagerly await the summer days when EA Sports releases its latest incantation of NCAA Football. This year was no different. I couldn't wait to play my favorite team with all new rosters. I fully expected some real changes as EA usually puts out. All of this allows me to justify spending $50 each year when this new version is released. This year lets just say I wish I had put the $50 back into my pocket and continued playing 2004 NCAA Football which is a clearly superior version. RANT ON: First, if you are going to release a new version of a game on a yearly basis and charge the same amount of money for it each time, please at least improve some level of the visuals in the game. That didn't happen. The graphics are exactly the same as 2004, which is still very good for a PS2 game, but not for another $50. Second, EA has to understand that after playing through 4 or 5 seasons of NCAA 2003 AND 2004 in DYNASTY Mode (roughly 50+ hours of PT) you really get sick of listening to the same commentary from Nessler, Corso and Herbstreit. PLEASE PLEASE update this for 2006. Even if you have to get some new announcers. How much would it cost to just have Corso and Herbstreit make a few more analysis comments. It gets real repetitive. Third, the crowds have got to get better looking. Once again the crowds look like paper cut outs cheering for their paper teammates. This game is to good for that kind of stuff, especially when one of the new features relies on crowd participation. RANT OFF! Ok, now for some good. The gameplay action in game is still high quality. You definitely get a good feel for running the ball and juking players. The play calling is still intuitive and easy and you now have a few more moves on D to break off blocks. You also now have a big hit button that allows you to lay the wood to unsuspecting ball carriers. That WR coming over the middle bring your safety and make him pay. He may make the catch, but the next time he comes across the middle he may not. This leads me into the new matchup stick feature which allows you to look for weaknesses in the opposing D and O to exploit. You have a good WR who has made some catches, go right after that DB who is now shaking in his boots and has lost some skill rating because of it. The only real critique of it is sometimes it can take a little to long to make these determinations and the play clock can run down, but you get better at it. This leads me to the tweaking of the passing game. The more you complete passes the higher your player rating gets, but suffer some incompletions and your likely looking at some dropped passes and bad throws from your QB (or missed tackles from your LB or fumbles for your RB). While this adds a realistic element to the game, it can be really frustrating when you have a 90 rated QB throwing behind his 92 rated WR constantly, or that same receiver dropping passes right to him. This needs to be tweaked for next year so I dont break so many controllers. Another new feature is the crowd noise factor. Its real nice if you play with a team in a stadium that can get the MAX loud. Otherwise its really annoying to try and call an audible, have your guys lineup in the wrong formation or run the wrong routes. It also isnt very consistent with the level of noise required to cause this mass confusion. Some times its half of the meter, sometimes its 3/4 and only the largest stadiums can ever get the full meter effect despite smaller venues being known for the crowd noise. This is something the EA boys should tweak slightly for next year. The best feature that EA modified is the recruiting system. In DYNASTY Mode you get to recruit at season's end to stock up for the next year. I love this part of the game. Its nice hour to two hour session where you analyze all of the available recruits and choose which ones you want to go after. A couple of new features are present here. First, you assign the amount of points you want your coaches to spend on recruits based on actual recruiting, training, and discipline. Which leads me to point #2, this year discipline is a factor. If you recruit someone with a low discipline rating, he is likely to end up in some trouble in his 4 years at the U. So you have to decide how you want your points distributed when recruiting, but be careful not to leave to few for recruiting otherwise you miss out on the blue chippers you need to buil a DYNASTY. I had a problem with this discipline system though. It seemed that my team would have an awful lot of suspensions and the like despite having a team discipline rating of 'A'. Some players with 'B' ratings were getting in BIG trouble like cheating on tests assaulting people in their off campus apartments or accepting money. This would lead to 3-4 game suspensions. That leads to another aspect of the discipline system. Over the course of a season you get discipline points and when someone gets in trouble you spend these points to suspend or sanction the players. You use less points if you take the recommended action or even dish out a harsher penalty. If you take a lesser action you have to use more points. The more points you use the more the NCAA notices. So after my first season in DYNASTY I was put on probation by the NCAA and lost 10 scholarships for the next two years. Now this takes some fun out of the game and I feel while this is an interesting new feature, it also needs to be tweaked and EA needs to understand that teams dont suspend players 7-10 times a season. It also sucks to have your star RB out for 4 games during a season for something you have no control over. Overall, this game retains the high quality gameplay features of past NCAA Football games, but fails to deliver much innovation or new features to justify another $50 expense. I would recommend to EA that if they are just going to put the same game out with some minor tweaks go the way of ESPN and lower the asking price to $20-$30. When you decide to come out with a facelifted game then I will be more than willing to plop down $50.
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