Review: NCAA Football 2010 (Xbox 360)

As a life-long football fan, I have played many football simulation games over the years. It all started with Mattel’s electronic football. Later I got Realsports Football for the Atari 5200, which was a huge step up, but still (as one can see from the graphics) not very realistic.  These early games just let one simulate a single game, with a reduced number of players (not the 11-on-a-side that you have in real-life football). Their goal was to retain the basic feel of the game, but they did not have the ability to make it very realistic.

Later, in the 1990s, I got better computer (a 486/33) and a better version of football simulation, called “NFL”, which gave the player the ability to play all the professional NFL teams (with randomly generated players, of course) and follow an entire season from exhibition games to the Super Bowl.  This game was a lot of fun, but ultimately the AI was limited, and there was a trick to running successfully. I found out that because the defense pretty much only played man-to-man coverage, if you motioned a receiver from one side to the other, the defender would follow, leaving a hole on the vacated side that you could run to. The result wasn’t necessarily a break-it-for-a-TD big-gainer, but you could reliably get at least 5 yards per carry, and this made it basically impossible to be stopped.  I therefore was able to score on every possession (if I chose), and this made the game too easy and I lost interest.

I didn’t touch football games for over a decade after that, instead trying other sports like hockey, baseball, and tennis. But finally when I got my current desktop, I decided to try the current installation, which at the time was Madden NFL 2007 (despite the title, this game was released in 2006, not 2007).  It was miles ahead of the earlier versions, with not only excellent graphics and great sound, but also with good AI for the teams, coaches, and players on the field. I was able to eventually master it on easy mode, though I found that it was too hard on the harder modes for me to be able to win.  I eventually gave up frustrated by the lack of a good challenge for me — the easy mode was a walk-over, and the hard-mode was unwinnable.  I was also disappointed with their “superstar” mode, in which one creates a single player almost as a “character” in an RPG, and plays that player (and nobody else on the team) for an entire multi-year career. It’s a cool concept, but I hated the “behind the helmet” view and was annoyed that I could not switch into the other views that you can use in the rest of the game.  Upon hearing that this had been fixed in Madden 2008, I mistakenly tried buying that game too, only to learn that the ability to switch cameras was in the console version only, and had not made it into the PC version.

I gave up on Madden at that point, but I had always heard things (some good, some bad) about the other football game from Electronic Arts — NCAA Football.  It seemed to have problems not too different from those of Madden, but one thing that it had going for it (in my view) was the college football theme. I’ve always preferred collegiate and amateur sports to professional sports, and particularly enjoyed going to college games when I was a graduate student. There’s something different about the college football experience. Maybe it’s the band, or the younger crowd, or the fact that the guys on the field are part-timers rather than full-time professionals, so they play a little differently (they make more mistakes, which leads to break-away plays more often).

And so, when I got my Xbox 360, the second game I bought, and the first one I got at full price, was the current incarnation of NCAA Football… NCAA 2010.  I have greatly enjoyed the game, though it does have a few of the draw-backs the older versions of Madden suffered from — most notably, the inability to realistically or usefully change camera views, this time in any mode of play.  Since the computer can show you the play on the fully rendered 3D fields from any angle, I think this is a mistake on their part, but fortunately on a widescreen TV, this is somewhat mitigated (you can see more width of the field than on a 4:3 aspect monitor).  Below will be my (highly opinionated, as always) review of this game offering from EA.

Graphics – 10/10

The graphics in NCAA Football 2010  are first-rate.  You can see show on the ground with footprints as players run around in it when it is cold out. You can see dirt building up on uniforms when it’s raining and the field is wet.  You can see scratches on the players’ helmets.  Everything is well rendered, including the stadiums, cheerleaders, and even (to a degree) the crowd.  The game was designed to be played on a high-def TV, and on my HDTV, it looks fantastic.

Gameplay – 8/10

The gameplay is decent, although it has issues in a few areas.  One persistent problem I have when quarterbacking is the lack of responsiveness of the “A” button in particular. The “A” button is used to hike the ball, and is also used to throw to the “A” labeled receiver (usually a tight end). I have no issues with any of the other buttons, but for some reason after hiking, the “A” button almost seems to become disabled briefly, because almost every time I try to throw to the “A” receiver, I have to hit the button twice. This almost always results in me either getting sacked for holding the ball too long, or throwing an incompletion or interception.  It’s gotten to the point now where I just have to discount the “A” receiver — which is very aggravating if he is the one who has managed to get open.  This may perhaps be just a problem with my particular game system or controller — there’s no way I can tell if that’s the case.

A second, somewhat larger issue, is a repeat of what I mentioned above happening in Madden NFL Football — namely, that the easiest mode (“Freshman”) and the next harder mode (“Varsity”) create too large of a leap in difficulty.  I can run and pass all over the defense and sack the quarterback 37 times a game on “Freshman.”  Put it on “Varsity,” and doing the exact same things, I can’t get within 5 yards of the quarterback all game, the offense runs all over my D, and I can’t complete a pass or run for more than 2 yards per carry.  The difficulty should not change this wildly when upping it a single step.

One nice aspect of the game play that I think is new this year is something called “setup.” This is where the offense’s play calling can set the defense up so they are thinking one thing, and you can fool them with another. An obvious example would be if you do a few successful run plays in a row, the defense starts thinking “run”, and you may find that your play action pass out of the same formation you’ve been using to run is “set up” — meaning that you can fool the defense with it. Your chances of being successful go up, supposedly. This seems to work, in the sense that these setup plays usually will get you decent yardage. I’m not sure what is happening though — either the computer is forcing blown coverage, or perhaps your catch % goes up, or something.  It’s hard to tell much other than that it works.

Overall, the gameplay is pretty good. The game makes you feel like you are right there, on the field, playing with the other players in the stadium.  The play is realistic so that you feel like you are really playing an actual football game.  It looks and feels very good. I enjoy all aspects of the game — running, passing, and at least the run stopping version of the defense.  Pass defense is impossible, at least for me, but always was in Madden as well. I just leave that to the AI. Speaking of which…

Playcalling/AI – 8/10

The AI is about the same in NCAA Football as in Madden for most things.  The computer is pretty good about reacting to your formations — they will put in a nickel package against your shotgun formation with 4 wide-outs, for example, and they will bring the run blitz on 3rd and inches.  It’s not overly easy to fool the AI, even on “Freshman” mode, and as you raise the difficulty, tricking the AI becomes much harder.  When playing against you, the computer is acceptably intelligent.

When playing on your side, unfortunately, it’s a bit of another matter, at least in the game’s version of “superstar” mode, which is called “Road to Glory.” In this mode you pick one player, your star athlete, and you play him, and only him, for 4 seasons, trying to break records and get great stats for him (winning the game is useful, of course, for recognition, but you can easily play a “Barry Sanders” type player who is awesome at his own position on a horrible team, and earn good stats).  The problem here is that the AI seems to make pretty stupid decisions much of the time. I’ve only played the RTG mode with one team — South Carolina — so far, so perhaps it is just the old “chicken curse” of the Gamecocks that was deliberately programmed in (because the real-life Gamecocks have pulled some head-scratchers over the yeears), but the AI coach calls plays for the team that frequently make no sense. For example, when you’re up by a touchdown already and you’re at 4th and goal, most coaches would go for a field goal and be happy to be up by 2 scores, especially late in the game. Not your AI coach, though… he’s going to go for it.  And when he goes for it from 4th and goal at the 9, he’s going to call a play that’s sure to fail, like an option — an option where the fool of a quarterback, instead of tossing the ball to the Heisman-trophy-candidate all-NCAA running back who has broken every record in the books on the ground, will keep it himself.  You can guess what happens in such a situation.

I think the most frustrating aspect of RTG is that you can play a position that the computer will not utilize fully — so for example, you’re playing a running back, and the computer passes the ball over and over again.  The game mostly follows the established patterns of the coaches, and probably this means that USC passes a lot. However, there should be a way for me, as player, to go in and set the game so that the computer is biased toward running if I want a lot of touches. After all, it’s my game and my road to glory. Why shouldn’t I be able to demand the ball more?

And so, the AI is pretty good, but it definitely pulls some head-scratchers when it comes to coaching decisions.  I’d like to see them improve this aspect of the game.

Performance – 10/10

Performance on my Xbox 360 with my TV is excellent. I have not had any issues. The game is as smooth as silk, and was clearly well optimized for the Xbox platform.

Sound – 8/10

The sound is good, although there are some issues. First, they seem to have had a band record all the main fight songs of the various schools. At first I did not realize this was the case… I played South Carolina, and I have only ever gone to their home games, and heard their band (except for a few cases such as when the Georgia band visited our stadium).  The only band music I’d heard, therefore, was the USC band’s, and so the songs just sounded familiar, and I didn’t give them much though. Then, however, I started playing the Wyoming Cowboys, and noticed that the band music was all different.  I have not played other teams but I surmise from this that they have music from all 120 bands in the game — which is very cool. And it sounds great.

However, the music while you’re in the menus is obtrusive and annoying, enough that I had to turn it off (well, down to 0, which amounts to the same thing).  Also the menu music is much louder than the game music, which forced me to keep fiddling with my sound volume settings, and there really is no reason for this. The game should be at the same volume level all the time.

Overall, however, the sounds are realistic and well done, and this is a solid aspect of the game.

User interface – 7/10

The user interface (UI) is hard to rate because there are so many components of it. There is the in-game component (what you use to run your plays). There is the menu component (how the menus work outside of the game). And there is the recruiting component, where you locate, call, and offer scholarships to the best prospects you can find.  My overall impression of this is that the in-game controls are mostly fine, but the menu and recruiting systems need work.  Some menu items are very hard to find — there were a couple that I found once and then went bananas trying to find again. This might have been less of an issue if the instruction manual had been of any use, but it basically is not. They explain nothing in the manual (this is the standard case these days, unfortunately), forcing you to “learn as you go.”

Fun – 8/10

NCAA Football 2010 is a very fun game to play, overall. I enjoy it immensely, and have completed over 3 seasons of my RTG star running back (who has already won the Heisman trophy), and half a season in Dynasty mode with the Wyoming Cowboys. It’s a lot of fun, but there are a few hiccups. I’d say the biggest one is the time in between games in RTG mode. This aspect frankly is an abject failure.   Basically, each and every day in between one game and another (Monday through Friday) you have to both do practice, and do an “evening” activity such as going to the library, hitting the weight room, or studying your playbook.  These things can temporarily affect your stats, at least in theory, but I’ve never seen it made any apparent difference on the field. Also, because you do them every single day, you’re talking hundreds of these in a career, and these evening activities become horribly boring. They also are just button clicks (you don’t do anything, just click “study play book” and it simulates the activity.  The practice itself is useful to work the kinks out of plays in Dynasty mode, but is useless in RTG mode, because it makes you run random plays, and each play of the practice session is different. Thus if you are having trouble getting the screen pass to work right, you can’t choose to practice it with your RTG star until you get it right (which is what one would normally do in a practice). I ended up after a few weeks of play, just “simming” all the practices  — making that whole aspect of the game effectively useless.

However, other than these hiccups, the game is a lot of fun, and I have played it for many, many hours (the sure sign of a well-designed game).  I actually managed to win against FAU with Wyoming yesterday 41-38 in OT, and I was fist-pumping with each good play and made a lot of noise in celebration when I won… almost as if I were cheering on a real team of which I was a fan.  You can’t have that kind of reaction if a game is not fun.

Overall – 8.4/10

Overall, NCAA Football 2010 is a very good game. It’s solid in most ways, and I have not noticed much in the way of bugs. I don’t use the online stuff like Teambuilder, so I did not comment on that. But as a stand-alone game it’s already very good, so I an only assume the online aspects would make it even better.  If you like football games on consoles or PCs, and you have an Xbox 360, I can definitely recommend this game.

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Mass Effect Re-Review (Xbox 360)

Some time ago, I tried playing Mass Effect on my (dinosaur of a) PC, and it just was not playable due mainly to performance issues. I also had some problems with the control system, which made the game very difficult to play.  However, I said then that if I got a better-performing computer, I would re-play the game.

Well, that didn’t happen exactly, but I did get a new system — an Xbox 360 rather than a whole new PC (on the logic that it plays games as well as a high-end PC would, but for a good $1200 less).  Since Xbox games usually perform well on that platform by default (there is no sense in a publisher making a game that the Xbox 360 can’t play well because there is no way to realistically upgrade it), I thought it might be worth taking a crack at Mass Effect on that platform. As an added bonus, since it’s an “old” game (as the industry regards these things) it was cheap ($20). So I picked it up and tried it again on the Xbox.

To start with, it took me some time to get used to the Xbox 360 controller scheme. However, the performance was smooth as silk (as expected), and many of the problems I had noted in the PC game were either reduced or totally nonexistent. This explains why my friends, all of whom had played it on the console, were so bewildered when I posted a non-positive review of it.  Since my impression of Mass Effect on the console is entirely different from the impression I had on the PC, I felt it warranted a re-review. I am going to leave the old one up as a “PC review” but add this Xbox version so that people can get the sense of my impression on both platforms. As always, my opinions are mine, and mine alone, and are not intended to be professionally objective.

Graphics 10/10
The graphics of Mass Effect are excellent on the console.  Character design is realistic and top notch, and you won’t find much better visuals in any game on the market.  Special effects look good, and the models are well designed. There’s not much to say here other than that the graphics are excellent.  The overly “dark” feel I got from the PC version of the game was not present here… perhaps it was a monitor or video card issue.

Character Design/Development – 8/10
I like the basic way they have the character design set up.  There are classes, and each class gets access to certain types of weapon, certain armor, and certain “class skills”.  Not all skills can be learned by a given class, which some might see as restrictive. However, this is counter-balanced by the fact that there are more possible skills to learn than skill points to allocate.  Indeed after the early levels you only get 2 skill points per level, even though you will often want to allocate as many as half a dozen at the same time — which means you have to be very careful what to specialize in.  I also like that they allow you (for once) to pick your background from amongst a few choices (though these are still relatively narrow in range) and to pick your gender and so forth.  This is great stuff.  I only wish they had gone all the way and just given you the whole list of skills, and skill points, and let you specialize in whatever you wanted.  Realistically they give you enough choices with the classes and hybrid classes that you can almost do this anyway, so it is a good character creation system.  This seciton would get 10/10 if it were not for the limited looks of the characters.  They give you a lot of sliders to play with, but to be honest the sliders don’t seem to do a whole lot. And for the female models, I utterly despised almost every hairstyle they presented me with.  What is it with Bioware and hair?  I don’t think I have yet played a Bioware game where it was possible for a female character to have hair that came down past the top of the shoulders. When this happened in Neverwinter Nights I let it slide, since it was one of the first “3D” type RPGs I had seen. But this is 2008, people… there are dozens of games on the market with long hair possible, from the Sims to most MMORPGs.  Why can’t they put in some long hair options with this game?  The other problem with the look is typical of most loot-based RPGs, of which this is definitely one — the look of my character is determined by what has good stats, not by what looks good on her. This is always frustrating to me.  So, these guys get a 9/10 for stat customization, and 7/10 for look customization, which I’ll average out to net them an 8.

Game system – 8/10
The game system of a CRPG is the equivalent of a table-top game’s combat and adventuring (as opposed to charcter design) rules.  This is things like how to-hit is resolved, how damage works, and the like. I found to be relatively well done.  One thing becomes very clear after my full play-through on the console: this game was designed for the console, not the PC, and the PC adaptation is not as smooth as it could have been.  The controller buttons are intuitive and easily grasped, and I had no real problem managing the system.  I often quibble when RPGs use what amounts to my reflexes in place of my characters, and Mass Effect does this, no doubt. But it is done in a way that does not overly offend my sense of roleplaying. Overall, using the tight controller setup, I found the game system to be solid. It’s not a home run, but it’s not the foul tip I thought it was on the PC. It’s a solid lead-off double, I’d say.  I’ll point out here that I intuited this in my PC review, where I said “some of this could have been mitigated by the interface, which instead is clunky and, in my opinion, hard to use.”  Clearly I was right — with the better interface of the Xbox control scheme, the issues were mitigated, earning the Xbox version of the game 2 rating points over the PC in this category.

The game system doesn’t include just combat, however, and about half of it is conversation and investigation.  This end of the game is quite well done, as it is in most Bioware offerings.  The combat itself may be hyperactive, but it is punctuated by long periods of thinking and dialogue. You get charm and intimidate skills that will open up conversation options for you, allowing you to get more done without having to fight all the time.  This part saves the game system, in my view, for without it I would have rated it much lower.

Role-Playing – 10/10
For a single-player RPG, you will not find one that has a more sophisticated and interesting role-playing element.  You get to make all the important choices for your character. Their conversation interface is quite nice — a modification of the old system Bioware used to use. The old way, you would be presented with numbered options showing exactly the text your character will speak.  In Mass Effect, instead, you are given a circular “dial” where a very few words summarize what you will say, and then the character asks the question in a more verbose manner.  For example, an option might be “ask about job”, and when you select it, your character would say something like, “So what do you do on this space station, anyway?”  I like this better than the old system, because it allows you to be entertained by both your character’s statements, and the NPCs’ statements, since you don’t know exactly what the words will be.  Also, there is far less “text clutter” on the screen this way, and the game plays much more like a movie than the older Bioware games did.  Clearly, as with any CRPG, you’ll mainly be following a pre-set path, but you do have choices all along the way, and those choices affect how your character is seen by others.  They have two progress bars similar to the “light” and “dark” side bars in KOTOR, called here “Paragon” and “Renegade”, and the game will track your decisions and score you in each area.  Making choices that are illegal or morally questionable will raise your “renegade” score, whereas making choices that are ethical and legal will raise your “paragon” score.  Thus, you get to choose whether your character is a rule-follower, rule-breaker, or somewhere in between, and the game adjusts as you  make these decisions.  Once again Bioware has created a game with excellent roleplay potential for something that is a solo game.  Nobody does it any better than these guys, and that’s still true today.

Performance 10/10

I’m not entirely sure “performance” is an appropriate category on a console, since those games and systems are designed to work “right” much more so than a PC. However, I suppose Bioware could’ve so overdesigned this game that it brought even an Xbox and a high-def TV to their respective knees. However they did not. The performance on the Xbox is outstanding. It’s so much better than the PC version that it’s like they’re not even the same game. The unbearable “loading” issues from the PC did not exist on the console (loading happened very rarely and was quick when it did). The frame rate was constantly high, leading to super-smooth game-play. There were no glitches in the game at all.

Sound 8/10
The music is excellent, and the voices are, as usual in a Bioware game, well acted.  I was thrilled to find that they finally gave the main character (your character) a voice as well this time — in the past,your character was the only silent one, which seemed odd to me.  However, there is some sort of a problem with the way voices are done out of conversations.  The volume seems to be set differently for these (and to be unalterable), and to be at a much softer level.  This would not be too bad, except that sometimes as you finish a conversation, it will exit you out of the conversation “zoom” window, and the last line of the converstaion spoken by the NPC will be drowned out.  If this contains important quest information, you’ve got a problem.  I’m not sure why it did this, but it was a problem on both the Xbox and the PC.  I marked them down for this — it’s sloppy and should not have been necessary.

User Interface – 9/10

The UI for the Xbox is so much better than for the PC that it is like night and day.  The ATV, so impossible to control using mouse/keys on the PC, was easily and intuitively controllable on the Xbox (at least, for me).  The squad controls (for your NPC helpers) are much faster and easier to use on the Xbox, and I found myself actually using them (a lot) there, whereas I was ignoring them on the PC because I found them too hard to use. My only quibble is the radial menu for doing special moves or swapping weapons. I found it very difficult to pick the one I wanted easily. The cursor kept hopping too far one way then too far back the other way when trying to make my selections. The game is paused when doing this so it’s not a huge deal — you hold it in pause until you manage to corral the cursor where you want it. But it shouldn’t be necessary to fight with the left stick on the controller — basically the “trim” for this part of the interface needs to be adjusted. I marked them down a tad for this, since it’s sloppy, but otherwise the interface on the Xbox is intuitive and usable. Much better than the PC version.

Fun – 10/10
In my PC review, I said, “There’s no doubt that Mass Effect has the skeleton of a good game here.”  Oh how right that was.  The “skeleton” was there, as well as the meat, skin, hair, nails, and organs. It’s a solid, fun game, on the Xbox 360. The problem is that only the skeleton is apparent on the PC — which is why I rated the PC so poorly.  On the Xbox, I had a blast with this game, and couldn’t stop playing it some nights, even when it was time for bed. I powered through it in just over 2 weeks of hard play, and I didn’t manage to do every single side-quest. It’s well worth a re-play to try the different classes/options… and was amazingly fun. Far more fun than the PC version, which was an exercise in frustration.

Overall – 9.1/10
When you average all the scores, we end up with an A- for this game — 9.1 out of 10.  This is my highest rating yet on this blog, and I think Bioware deserves it.  The console version of Mass Effect can proudly take its place along side masterpieces like  NWN, KOTOR, and Jade Empire as “must play” games.  If you like Bioware games, or just like RPGs in general, Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 is a great offering, and is worlds better than the PC adaptation. My advice: Just steer clear of the PC version of this game and you’re good to go. Get the Xbox version (especially now that it is cheap!).

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