Mixed Reviews for NCAA 09

By Sean · Monday, July 14, 2008 · 1:19 AM |  Share | 3 Comments 

NCAA Football 09 isn’t officially in stores until tomorrow, but as usual, many people have gotten the game early. This happens every year and gives people that still don’t have the game a chance to get a taste of what to expect. Most of the time it creates even more hype as the anticipation grows, but this year the complete opposite has happened.

Although most people with the game report that it is fun to play, that feedback is greatly overshadowed by the countless number of bugs and glitches that have also been revealed. Some of the bugs and glitches are no big deal and won’t have a huge effect on your ability to enjoy the game, but others are fairly big. I’ll get into the details in a second, but you should know that a patch is already in discussion by EA and one is expected to be out. When? No one really knows. It could be a few weeks or a few months. Either way, the fact that a patch is already necessary shows you how bad some of these problems are.

Probably the biggest issue out there so far is the many problems involving rosters. As you may or may not know, EA implemented a feature this year that allows people to share roster files. Roster sharing has been going on for many years, but only now has EA made it possible to transfer files on the game itself (you have to have an Internet connection). In the past, people have had to download the files from the Internet and then transfer them to their console via a third-party device. That’s still possible now, but it is much easier to just do it on the game.

EA has been marketing this new feature as it is will make the game much better. Rather than use the default rosters that just have a position and a number to differentiate the players, you can download fully named rosters. With fully named rosters the game becomes much more realistic as you even get to hear the real names in the commentary. All in all, this new feature was expected to be great (key word being expected).

I don’t doubt that these issues will be fixed in the future, but right now the game is freezing due to the roster files for a few different reasons. Sometimes downloaded rosters freeze the game in a dynasty or something, and other times the game simply freezes when trying to edit the rosters. To make matters even worse, some teams are disappearing from the game when rosters are edited a certain number of times.

Like I said, I imagine these issues will be fixed in the future, and it should be noted that not everyone is having problems, but it’s pretty pathetic that there are this many glitches with a feature like this. I do have to mention that some workarounds are being talked about that prevents roster files from crashing the game, but we probably won’t know if those workarounds are actually successful until the files are released tomorrow.

Aside from the roster issues, the most important aspect of NCAA 09, the gameplay, is also having its own problems. EA touted NCAA 09 as having “wide open gameplay,” something that would reflect the faster style of college football that is played these days. Well, it sounds like EA may have struck out with that feature as well.

To incorporate “wide open gameplay,” the defenses in NCAA 09 reportedly have been incredibly dumbed down. By this, I mean that it is far too hard to play defense when lining up against the computer. When you are on defense, most people have reported that the opposing computer quarterbacks are way too accurate. The norm is only five or so incompletions a game according to some, and that is only because of dropped passes. On top of that, the computer’s offensive line supposedly is way too dominant, even against the best teams in the game. With an extremely accurate QB and barely any pass rush, the results aren’t good.

Special teams in general is also allegedly a complete joke in this game as returning punts and kicks is too easy. I’m not saying you will score a TD every time, but when the average for some is a return of 30 yards, there’s a problem. This is happening due to poor pursuit angles as well as bad AI (artificial intelligence). Some computer players just run away from the player with the ball for no reason despite having a clear shot at a tackle. This spills over into defense as well, causing issues for those that actually hope for a challenge when running an offense.

I probably should reserve my judgment until I actually pick up a copy of the game, but I’m going into Tuesday with low expectations. I suppose the casual gamers out there won’t really notice many of these issues, but for people that play this game inside and out year after year, the game may not be all that fun.

Again, I’ll wait until tomorrow and hope that some of these issues will be fixed or are simply overstated, but my excitement for the game certainly has taken a nosedive. Some may ask what the big deal is since it’s only a video game, but for many college football fanatics, this is what gets us through the summer until real football is being played again. It isn’t the end of the world obviously, but it would be disappointing if this game is as bad as some make it sound.