Digital Entertainment NewsNews and reviews from the perspective of the average gamer.

Subscribe to DigNews

NCAA March Madness 2007

Sometimes, after playing a basketball game made by EA Sports, I seriously wonder if they’re even trying anymore. Sure, EA does well with their college football and NFL games – primarily because they hold the exclusive licenses on those sports. And games like Fight Night, MVP NCAA Baseball, and even their Tiger Woods PGA games are solid. But when it comes to basketball, EA Sports’ games are bad and only seem to be getting worse with each passing year.

The latest entry, NCAA March Madness 07, does nothing to break this trend. From the moment you begin dynasty mode, the pain you’re about to endure becomes clear. Creating your coach is a quick, undetailed affair – so lacking in detail, it is insulting. Plus, you can start your career at any college in the nation, so forget any kind of realistic simulation of a coaching career – unless you enforce it on yourself. The game certainly won’t support it, however.

Now, there are some redeeming qualities to the dynasty mode. There are more rules violation types this time out, more off-court pressure from administration and alumni, and some nice sidetracking items and mini-games. These would all be nice icing on the cake if the rest of the game were solid; it’s not.

When you begin a dynasty, you must complete six steps before you really get into the game. The main problem is the navigation element; it’s easy to go into step one, for example, but once you’re finished, you must back out to the root six-step menu and select step two … and you even get a warning message asking if you’re sure, making you wonder if you did everything you need to do. There’s no way to advance to the next step while within your current step.

Recruiting is a major pain in the rear, also. It’s difficult to sort players and there are only a limited number of fields that can even be sorted. You can sort by name, defensive rating and offensive rating. You can also sort by Top 100 or all recruits, as well as by targets. But you can’t browse prospects by state, interest level or even by GPA. This complicates matters greatly.

I took over San Diego State for the purposes of my review and was shocked to discover that California, one of the most populous states in the nation, had something like only seven recruits listed. Of those, only a couple were interested even remotely in the Aztecs program, despite beginning the season with a Top 25 ranking. Of course, it was nigh-impossible to find those recruits who actually were interested in the Aztecs, because you can’t sort by state of origin or interest. Lovely.

The rest of the game is predictable shoddy and rushed – which is weird considering it’s hitting shelves about months after 2K Sports’ College Hoops 2K7 landed at retail. Of course, EA Sports still isn’t bothering to tie its NCAA game with NBA Live, meaning you can’t export draft files and bring your graduates into NBA Live. So that kills all interest in buying both; with EA, it’s literally “pick your poison” between their two hoops titles. There is simply no compelling reason to buy both. Or either, for that matter.

As for the game itself, while not quite as arcade-style as NBA Street or even NBA Live, March Madness is definitely not a sim-style game for college hardwood purists. The two shooting buttons (one for dunks, one for shots from distance) are placed at the left and right positions, not the left and bottom, which is not a natural feel. The game plays, well… weird.

Of course, you can dance with cheerleaders, interact with the crowd, chest-bump teammates and other activities to whip the home stands into a Pavlovian frenzy, but all of that is tangential to what should be the core focus of the game: how well it plays on the court.

When the final book is written on NCAA March Madness 07, the game simply does not deliver a pleasant, realistic or even challenging experience for most gamers. Both 2K Sports’ NCAA College Hoops 2K7 and Wolverine Studios Total College Basketball are much better representations of the world of college hoops, and both deliver far deeper immersion experiences, with far better navigation features for tasks like recruiting, than anything NCAA March Madness 07 has to offer.

Considering that Wolverine Studios’ Total College Basketball is at least a couple years old and only offers a live-game experience that displays little squares with numbers in them going back and forth across a 2D court, to represent players, that’s saying something pretty sad about the state of affairs at EA Sports when it comes to basketball titles. Really, the best thing EA Sports could do is trash both NBA Live and March Madness, take a year off to rebuild their game engines and, indeed, their entire basketball franchises, over from the ground up, and start fresh in 2009.

Sure, it’s not likely to happen, but by having to put out a new title in the series every year, it’s unlikely that March Madness is ever going to experience enough of a makeover to fix what’s wrong in the game so that the handful of stuff that’s good can be part of a game that hardcore hoops fans will want to play.

[ Post the first comment | View related posts ]

Tags: NCAA March Madness 2007

Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Feb 28th, 2007 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox 360 Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Enter your email address:

Related Posts

• Hoops Screenshots
• Even More 360 Madness
• NCAA March Madness 2007
• Releasing The Madness
• NCAA March Madness 2007
• Getting Mad
• Other Platforms Shafted?

Post a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.