NCAA Football 06 Review
The improved game balance and new features make NCAA Football 06 arguably the best in the series, as well as a game that's a must-have for college football fanatics.
The Good
- Much improved game balance over last year's
- Controls mapped to right analog stick mean more-intuitive gameplay
- New animations make for a great-looking game overall
- In-season recruiting and improved features in dynasty mode .
The Bad
- Certain new features not quite as refined as they could be.
Graphically, player models have been tweaked to look skinnier than players in Madden, which helps reflect the young age of college football players, most of whom haven't fully filled out yet. There have also been a lot of additions made to the animations in NCAA 06. Gang tackles, pancake blocks, and other new animations have been added, further refining the game's looks. The base engine remains pretty much the same, though, so don't expect quite the same level of visual polish as in the Madden games. A new College GameDay-like pregame show has been added, starring the announcers Brad Nessler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Lee Corso. While new commentary from the trio helps with the audio presentation, the actual character models for the three look rather rough, and they don't animate very well at all.
The sound effects in the game remain good overall, but, unfortunately, EA has decided to include EA Trax to score the menus. As a result, the songs in the soundtrack are a mishmash of different genres. You'll be grooving to De La Soul's "Me, Myself and I" one moment, and the next you're feeling angst while listening to the Clash's "Train in Vain." How do those go together? We're still wondering. The other tracks are primarily commercialized pseudopunk that were probably rejected from the Burnout 3 soundtrack, as none of them evokes a college football mood. Thankfully, you can switch to traditional fight songs in the settings, but if you want to play the spring drills minigames, you're still forced to listen to the mess of EA Trax.
Online play is included on both platforms, and it seemed to work well in our testing on empty test servers. Gameplay was generally responsive and lag-free, so hopefully this situation will continue on the retail servers as they fill up with players. You'll need to create a login on EA's servers, and there you'll be treated to the usual array of features, including ranked ladders, lobbies, news, periodic tournaments, and more.
As far as the differences between the two platforms, the PS2 version has superior control over the Xbox version because all the buttons are more easily reachable. If you play a lot of option offense, for example, you won't like that the pitch and fake-pitch buttons are mapped to the black and white buttons on the Xbox controller. The control issues relating to button placement are, in fact, appreciable on both sides of the ball. However, the PS2 version of the game suffers from really long load times for menus, as well as when simulating weeks during the dynasty and race for the Heisman modes. The Xbox loads and simulates many times faster, so if you envision yourself spending a lot of time in the career modes, you may want to consider the Xbox version, even with its control issues. Finally, the PS2 version does suffer from slowdown in some circumstances. The frame rate drop seems to happen the most on kickoff returns and other low-angle situations, but in general, it's not nearly the big problem that the Xbox slowdowns were on last year's game. It's difficult for us to determine which version is better, so deciding between faster load times and slicker in-game controls is likely to be a more personal decision.
While a bevy of nifty new features has been added to NCAA Football 06, the best aspect of the game is probably its re-tweaking of the usual NCAA game balance. The actual nuts and bolts of playing a game of NCAA 06 make it feel just right, and for veterans of the series, playing will evoke warm memories of NCAA 04. Combining that great gameplay balance with all the new features added over the past two years results in a game that every college football fan should have in his or her library.
NCAA Football 06 Quick Links
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- GameSpot Scoregreat
Player Reviews
Critic Scores
- IGN 9.2 / 10
- TeamXbox 9.4 / 10
- Worth Playing 9 / 10
- Gaming Age A-
- GameZone 9.5 / 10
- 1UP 8.5 / 10
- Gametrailers 9.3 / 10
- Globe Technology 5 / 5
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