To tide me down till the release of Madden 2005 next month, I made an infrequent trip to Blockbuster to rent EA Sports' NCAA Football 2005 video game. No, I didn't want popcorn with it — and yes, the lady behind the counter asked — but the pageantry of college football has come home to my living room.
The hooker-attended recruiting parties. The under-the-table booster payments. The mid-season DUI charges that put the head coach in a moral pickle.
Lest you think Florida State is the only team in this game, let me assure you there's much more. All Division I-A teams are represented, along with an assortment of I-AA teams to ignore, as well as national championship squads from years gone by.
Once you stop laughing when an all-white team like the 1961 Alabama Crimson Tide runs onto the field, the gameplay is tremendous. The most-hyped new feature of the game is the homefield advantage aspect. Visiting teams are affected by the home crowd, just as in real life when LSU fans throw whiskey bottles or West Virginia hillbillies spit tobacco juice at the opponents. In big spots on the road, the screen and controller vibrate, throwing you off your game, as if you were playing from Wilt Chamberlain's old waterbed. And the end result can hurt just as bad.
According to EA Sports, the five toughest places for teams to visit are Florida, Tennessee, Ohio State, LSU and Oregon. Twenty others are given homefield priority, including Syracuse (20) and Miami (25), which won 58 straight home games from 1985-94. Apparently now, though, it's harder to win at West Virginia, which is supposedly the 23rd-toughest place at which to play. (The Mountaineers have won more than eight games in a season exactly once since 1993. The Hurricanes are 46-4 in the new millennium.)
As with any modern game, the customability is overwhelming. You can create your own schools (Grand Lakes University, here we come!), uniforms, players, and even mascots. I don't know if I could come close to topping the real-life, real-person Village People-like hilarity of the West Virginia Mountaineer and Notre Dame Leprechaun. I'm not sure if mascots qualify for same-sex marriages, but I hear they're on a flight to Boston right now.
Other great features in the game include:
• A Matchup Stick, which allows you to view how your on-field personnel stacks up with the opponent on each play
• Touch passing that I couldn't master
• Post-TD celebrations you'll try once or twice before getting tired of it (like beaning Mike Piazza in the head in each year's new baseball video game)
• Online play that allows you to lose to anonymous teenage cheaters across the country
• Bobby Bowden actually paying attention on the sideline
In Five Words or Less: Might Be Better Than Madden
NCAA Football 2005 Links:
• Custom Covers for Your Game — Don't like seeing Larry Fitzgerald on the cover? Print out a custom cover that represents your team, then slip it into the box. A great, great idea for a website.
• NCAA Football 2005 Strategy Discussion — A forum where people get advice on how to leave opponents in their wake.
• Metacritic.com Reviews — A collection of mainstream reviews of the game. Everyone pretty much loves it.
Todays Sports Links:
• Take the ESPN.com Sports Trivia Quiz — Inspired by Ken Jennings' run on Jeopardy. This one is tough, and I got only 15 out of 31.
• Andy Katz' College Hoops Preseason Top 25 — He's got the Orangemen at No. 5 and says a case can be made for them getting the top spot. I don't know whether to be happy or concerned. Can't remember the last time we were this hyped heading into a season.
• Kurkjian: Predicting Baseball's Second Half — The diminutive MLB scribe says Bonds will reach 700 home runs in 2004, Randy Johnson might be traded (but Nomar won't), and the Yankees will win the World Series.
• Detroit Unveils 2005 MLB All-Star Game Logos — God bless Jason Beck for having to "cover" this story for MLB.com.
• Subway Series: The New York Mets and Our National Pastime — An exhibit at the Queens Museum of Art, running from now till Oct. 24, "charts the team's transformation over the years, featuring images and objects, art and non-art, as well as works by leading figures in contemporary art addressing the longstanding traditions of baseball." The New York Yankees and the American Dream at the Bronx Museum of the Arts will open to public on July 23. And I hope to have pictures soon from that exhibit.
I am so excited about this game, I can't wait to pound the ball down the throat of my 9 year old son!!!!
Welcome to the BIGXII you little twerp!!!
Posted by Tequila Dave at July 20, 2004 11:00 AMYou're going down Sparky, all 70 pounds of ya!!!