NCAA GameBreaker 2001 Hands-On
With no PlayStation 2 version of NCAA 2001 from Electronic Arts in sight, GameBreaker could become this year's college football game of choice for PS2 owners.
NCAA GameBreaker 2001 for the Sony PlayStation 2 melds a bit of the old with some of the new. It borrows the PS2 NFL GameDay 2001 engine for its graphics and gameplay, and its feature set is virtually identical to that of GameBreaker 2001 for the original PlayStation. We had the opportunity to test the next-generation version of 989 Sports' college football series, and we found it to be a game that excels in some areas and falters in others.
NCAA GameBreaker 2001 opens with a rousing intro movie featuring the familiar voice of Keith Jackson, and it does a great job of re-creating the atmosphere of a college football game. Once in the options menu, the game presents you with several different modes. The PS2 GameBreaker 2001 has all the modes of the PlayStation version, including scrimmage, bowl season, tournament, fantasy game, and coaching career. In the coaching career mode, you can operate as a coaching hopeful. You enter a small school as a low-profile coach and move up the Division I-A ranks, and you ultimately secure a head-coaching job at one of the high-profile programs - this essentially serves as the game's dynasty mode. The personnel tweaking is handled through the game's athletic department feature. Here players can view rosters, recruit blue-chip players for several positions, and create walk-ons. In the create-a-walk-on mode, everything from physical attributes to 40 times and vertical jump results can be customized based on a traditional points system.
As mentioned previously, the game's graphics engine is the same as the one that was used for the PS2 version of NFL GameDay 2001, which means that, although the players are realistically modeled, the texturing on their uniforms and bodies is sparse, and it tends to meld together when viewed from certain camera perspectives. The collision detection, while sloppy in some situations, is generally acceptable. The same can be said for the game's animation, which is adequately smooth for the most part but looks choppy and disjointed at times. Several animations are missing effective transitional phases. A perfect example of this can be found in the passing game. Once a defensive back comes back down after contesting a pass, he will pause for a second and then transition into a running animation, but the wide receiver is usually not affected. As a result, receivers can catch the ball and take off for the end zone, while DBs are left behind for a fraction of a second. Our current build of GameBreakers also has excruciatingly long load times, but hopefully that will be fixed before the game's final release.
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