A somewhat fun football game to play but not for the non-football playing gamers out there.
NCAA Football 2005 ironically is a game detailing a 2004 college football season but like the thinking of car manufacturers, it's believed that adding the next year on to the front of your product makes people think subconsciously that your product is somehow futuristic. To not further any misconceptions, it's not futuristic at all. NCAA Football 2003 was my previously owned college football game and when comparing the two, not much has changed. Yes, graphics have been updated and new features have been added but all superficial and none substantive. EA sports a derivative developer of EA games prides itself on being the pick of the litter on sports games. And why not? They own most of the competition that's out now and they squelched Sega sport games. But to be fair Sega sports made pretty pathetic games. But getting back to the point, EA sports owns the sports game industry much like Microsoft owns most of the computer world (Mac users just level with me on this one). And like Microsoft, they put out mass productions of programs and OSes to satisfy customers but in the process, create problem ridden programs and OSes. EA sports may tell you they emulate the game perfectly and they can produce the high-tech up-to-date game but they are mostly pulling your leg.
To put it simply, EA sports, and probably EA games in general, is but professes that its not the machine of merchandising. Evidence for this is that it pulls in the Gameday crew from ESPN and releases the newest edition of the game a few weeks before the start of the college football season. There you have the ESPN crowd and the general college football crowd playing to the impulsivity of anxious college football fans waiting for the new season to start and buying the game to quell their desire. Chances are that such a game merchandised out to sell to the anxious public is not going to be especially as good as it could be. Some may question this but can EA sports really say "we weren't able to put that in" or "There wasn't enough time.", I mean, there one of the richest game developers in the game industry. More evidence that it is only geared toward football gamers is that it doesn't even have a simple tutorial.
For gameplay, it mostly depends on skill and difficulty level. If you're playing on very hard difficulty and your only a novice, yeh, then it's going to be frustrating, and if your expert and playing easy, it's going to be a boring game. But for any other gamer, it may seem like a completely foreign system. Nothing is really intuitive and most of it is hard to grasp if you haven't at least seen a few football games at your high school or on tv. For the football part itself it does ok overall but fails miserably in terms of how it should it be. For instance, players have a serious problem with not celebrating too much after a good play. Personally I have had to pause the game nearly 100 times a game to keep my players from inciting a unsportmanship like conduct penalty. Also punts and downs by the kick team are horribly messed up. And especially bad is that quarters can end on penalties, therefore nullifing them (which never happens in real football, unless the penalty is declined). Most of the problems are little intricacies of the game that the programmers got wrong. But one of the more apparent problems is the passing system. Most players play as if they always run on timing routes which can lead to many interceptions or many incompletes. And its even worse when you increase difficulty. Even putting a heisman player in a very hard difficulty game with a division AA talented team still provides an almost impossible game to win. The passing system definitely needs to be updated in future editions.
Graphics are the highlight of the game but not particularly awe-inspiring. It is easy to pick out where they cheated in terms of graphics. The crowd in the background looks more like a waving texture- gradient and players on the sidelines are few and undetailed. But kudos should be given for the detail of the players on the field.
The sound is sparse and only is limited to rivalry songs and a few emotional introductions to games. Nothing else really has any music and sound effects are also limited to the grunts and cheers or jeers of the crowd. They reproduced the rivalry songs quite well for the game and remarkably does not have any sound problems.
The overall value of the game is little. It fails to provide a faithful re-creation of the game itself, failing in passing and numerous other small intricacies. And it does nothing to bring non- football gamers. Like stated before, this a game to get a football fix in the off-season but to anyone who is a football fan it either frustrating or boring.