We are now weeks past NCAA 08 D-day and the flaws in the game begin to come to the forefront. One of this year's bugaboos: CPU quarterbacks throwing tons of picks. Fortunately for you, in the internet era there's always someone obsessed enough to work out the kinks with the sliders and report back on their findings. His name is Bill Abner, and his odyssey is at The Blog For The Sports Gamer:
...my current theory is that in order to limit the INTs, be it on All American level or Heisman level, you need to keep an eye on a few select settings. The WR Catch slider appears to be a huge, huge deal. (Not as key as QB Acc...but still) I thought that that that slider simply dealt with catching the ball; it would appear after sitting in practice mode and playing 3 games with this, that the slider also impacts how aggressive a player is in going AFTER a ball.
A lot of the silly INTs in this game are because the defender makes a break on the ball and the WR keeps running his pattern. I have this slider at 100. I think you can play with the Human Defense AWR bumped up a bit, but you really don't need to (especially on AA level) ...
I also want to talk about QB Accuracy. If Practice mode is any indication, this slider does a lot more than just force the cpu to make more accurate passes. More importantly, it forces them to make better decisions. Try it. Go into Practice mode with Acc set to 45 or 50. Find a play and a defense that the QB is throwing a high number of picks. Change the Acc now to around 80. Notice how the QB checks down now, and finds a safety valve or finds an open seam rather than forcing the ball into the spot it kept trying to find earlier.
It does kind of suck that the fiddling has to go on every year, but Bill mentions that there's a "great, great game" somewhere in NCAA that wasn't there in previous years. He's got more detail in a second post, then drops a third that says he's "turned the corner" on this issue but doesn't go into detail. Spill, I say!
A side note: Abner's turned on the new recruiting model, which is a "massive time sink" that's too easy, and still has a problem with the late game AI.
NCAA '08's commercials are all built around protagonists repairing damage done to them in "real life" by getting cathartic video game victories over Most Hated Enemy. Some of the protagonists are recognizable, like best damn baby momma Matt Leinart. Others are just varieties of mid-twenties everyman, like Lee Jennings:
Great commercial. Like the axe line, though it would probably be better in a Wisconsin-Minnesota commercial since they actually scuffle over an actual axe every year. But, uh... traumatized UT fan Lee Jennings went to Baylor. Bear Meat got an email from the guy -- real name Toby Meuli -- with Meuli's true feelings:
Putting on that burnt orange shirt after spending four years despising the Horns has been my greatest acting challenge to date.
Burnt Orange Nation, as you might expect, is nonplussed.
Touchdowns not worth 21 points, in case you were wondering.
An entertaining article from the Purdue student newspaper -- called "The Exponent," natch -- follows around some Purdue players as they pick up their NCAA '08 video game doppelgangers and get down to business. Backup wide receiver Desmond Tardy allows his opponent to pick the Boilers as long as he's inserted into the starting lineup, picks IU, and then does what IU does: lose badly.
With five seconds remaining and IU down 28-7, IU quarterback Kellen Lewis broke away from the pack and scored a touchdown.
If you are familiar with football you can easily identify being down three touchdowns with five seconds left as "garbage time." Other examples of garbage time: down 40 in the first half, up 31 midway through the third unless you are Michigan State or Minnesota, and the entirety of any Notre Dame bowl game. But, um... don't tell Tardy that:
Tardy rolled within inches of the TV and yelled at Lewis, then excitedly backed up and flipped his chair over, almost landing on his dog, Capone. "It's not over!" he yelled, seconds before Purdue won, 28-14.
Perhaps a total unfamiliarity with the rules was a major reason Tardy finished last year with a total of 88 receiving yards.
Reviews and impressions on NCAA '08 continue to roll in from the internets. There's always a honeymoon period when the new NCAA comes out and everyone is exploring the cool new stuff but hasn't figured out just what is going to drive them crazy for the next few months, and so most of the stuff rolling in is positive. Both Bruce Ciskie and I were impressed with our first experiences; negative nabob Ryan Ferguson and his curious obsession with player models is an outlier. A couple Michigan blogs have their own reviews up that you can take a look at, too, one from crazily-nicknamed "Anthony" who was so kind to let me drink beer and marvel at his enormous television screen. The other is over at Michigan Sports Center.
But we're just fans, not hardened critics who play all the games all the time and are paid for their reviews. One of the nice things about the internet is it lets you sidestep the actual review sites, which often serve more as hype regurgitation devices than as actual critics, and head down to the personal blogs of the guys in the trenches. After the jump we've got impressions from a couple of the best of these blogs and an exploration of Campus Legend mode... now without suck!
So, it's approaching 1AM. I am playing NCAA '08 and drinking beer. I am at work. I love you, Jamie Mottram. Anyway. Impressions gleaned from my "J-Bug" or "House" equivalent, who is taking the day off work tomorrow and has a 53 inch HDTV. He is also worthy of man-affection. He deserves some sort of stupid, ridiculous nickname. Let's call him "Anthony." It's time to rock.
GAME 1: West Virginia versus Lousiville ends 17-7 for the Cardinals. A defensive struggle featuring a 98 yard option fumble return touchdown and a Cardinal pick six when Pat White throws WAY BEHIND a receiver who is OPEN running a CROSSING ROUTE against MAN COVERAGE. The BASTARD. (The realism!)
Incidentally, I was playing West Virginia.
The first impression I have is... holy God there's a buttload of new stuff. The playbook revamp is very nice. You pick a personnel grouping, then are given a set of possible alignments for the grouping, then you pick your plays. They had this before but the way it's presented now is much more intuitive. The playbooks seem more extensive; there is still the issue where you call "slants" and everyone runs a slant. Are these real football plays? I would think if a player on one side of the field is running a slant you would run a different route on the other side of the field on the assumption that many zones would cover both. Also: disguising plays is now done by holding down the A button (or X button, whatever) and then continuing to move the cursor instead of the convoluted R1-R2 paging thing. Much better.
Every year, a dedicated band of nuts scour the nation for illicitly available copies of that year's version of NCAA. These are noble people in the tradition of Ponce De Leon, Magellan, and Mouse Davis, always pushing the boundaries of the possible. This year, an intrepid fellow named CAJUN COMMISH -- LSU fan, natch -- acquired a copy of the game a full week before its general release. You can see a few others have gotten their filthy, fortunate mitts on early copies and have started putting up points on XBox Live.
As you might expect, the commish is a little occupied -- it didn't help that last night he was called away to deal with "company" (the horror!) -- and few details are leaking back through the Operation Sports Message board where he is fielding mostly stupid questions. (One guy from Hawaii asks if EA has modeled long hair in the game over and over; there are seemingly infinite requests for the ratings of specific players. Here is the most ridiculous:
if you have time to get a rating i would like you to see if there is a freshman QB on Navy's roster. he would be listed between 6'2" and 6'5" and 200 pounds
Dayton91, you lose at the internet. If only my sterilizaton ray was functional! Fie!) First impressions after the jump.
I've never understood the bizarre desire of EA to hew so closely to real life when it comes to refereeing errors when they put in things like impact players and momentum so powerful that one incompletion in Kinnick Stadium inevitably leads to multiple touchdown losses. And possibly controller throwing. And in extremely severe cases, removing the game and hiding it under a couch so you can't play the blasted thing any more. Not that I've done that.
Um. Anyway. Realism does not seem to be especially high on EA's priority list when it comes to their games. I find this deeply and consistently irritating. But not when it comes to officiating. One of the nice things about playing video game football is the fact that no game is ever decided by, say, the officials completely ignoring the fact that you recovered an onside kick and awarding the ball to the other team. Referees in video games are perfect, or at least they should be. Unfortunately, once the NFL and, lately, NCAA adopted instant replay to fix the occasional mistakes their referees make, EA decided to spend time and energy better served elsewhere on this:
If you think the programmed-in refereeing is in error you can hit pause, navigate through multiple levels of menu, and challenge a call because it's "realistic." Personally, I would rather have unrealistic but perfectly accurate refs. I mean, commercials are realisti-- nevermind. I did not think that. Commercials are total fantasy and would reduce any football game that had them into a sweaty version of Kirby's Dreamland. You have my permission to assassinate me if there are ever six-minute long breaks whenever you play at Notre Dame.
MaddenMatrix.com has been busy beavering away, uncovering various teams' overall rating in NCAA '08 and tracking down the in-game top 25. Here's, um, most of it. There are still a few holes:
1. USC 2. Michigan (A+ offense, okay. A+ defense? Um... please be true?) 3. LSU 4. ? 5. Texas 6. ? 7. Wisconsin 8. West F'in Virginia 9. Virginia Tech 10. Arkansas 11. ? 12. Ohio State 13. Auburn 14. Nebraska 15. Tennessee 16. ? 17. Penn State 18. ? 19. UCLA 20. Rutgers 21. ? 22. TCU 23. Boise State25. Boston College 25. Texas A&M(?)
BC and A&M are both listed as #25; one of them is probably #24. Notable omissions from the list: Florida, Oklahoma, Cal, Louisville, and, um, whoever you're optimistic about in the ACC. Florida State probably. Maybe Clemson.
I thought maybe this was the year. Maybe this was the year I got fed up with EA's insistence on absurd features like momentum and key players or their inability to provide a difficulty level somewhere between Pokemon and hell on earth and decided to save fifty bucks and a lot of frustration.
Um... nope. Not this year.
The above for persons who cannot bring themselves to press play, is a look at NCAA '08's revamped recruiting system, which looks really freaking cool. Gone are the days of finding out that Local Five Star likes your coaching style and continually banging on him until he decides to go somewhere else. (Or, more infuriatingly: just doesn't commit to anyone. Seriously. WTF.) In its place is a system sort of like that but much more detailed, with the ability to influence a recruit's perception of your school. You can also make promises to recruits and be held to them -- break them and the kid will transfer.
Though it's still vaporware at the moment and EA has proven it can screw things up, it's a major step forward in Dynasty mode. Coupled with the new ability to sim the end of blowouts for or against and, yes, sometime in the next month or two I will spend some quality time getting to find out just what I find intolerable about this year's edition of the game. Also fun will be had. After the jump: more Dynasty revamp video.
We are now weeks past NCAA 08 D-day and the flaws in the game begin to come to the forefront. One of this year's bugaboos: CPU quarterbacks throwing tons of picks. Fortunately for you, in the internet era there's always someone obsessed enough to work out the kinks with the sliders and report back on their findings. His name is Bill Abner, and his odyssey is at The Blog For The Sports Gamer: 
MaddenMatrix.com has been busy beavering away, uncovering various teams' overall rating in NCAA '08 and tracking down the in-game top 25. Here's, um, 
