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NCAA Football 2004

Face it, people. NCAA Football 2004 will never be better than Madden. It’ll never even be as good. Why? A little corporate policy called “using last year’s Madden engine, modified for the college game.”

Sure, it makes good corporate sense of EA. Why dent Madden’s dominance for the sake of a college football title? Plus there are cost savings involved. Heck, even Sega started doing it last year and this year Sega didn’t even bother with a college title.

Happily, NCAA Football 2004 is still a sharp, solid gridiron title with plenty to like about it, even if it does lack Madden’s shinier, newer features like Playmaker audibles and a far more detailed off-season mode.

The one fun new feature that carries across from NCAA Football to Madden, as well as other EA Sports titles, is the new EA Sports Bio, which tracks the amount of time you play each EA title and what you accomplish in it. Spend a couple days solid in NCAA Football and the first time you play Madden, you get credit for your gaming time in the form of “secrets” that will automatically be unlocked. It’s a feature that makes sense for the gamer who buys several EA Sports titles a year. Why play 200 hours of NCAA to unlock a bunch of secrets only to start again in Madden, again in NBA Live, again in NCAA Basketball, again in Tiger Woods Golf and so forth? With the EA Sports Bio, it all counts on all titles: a good thing.

The heart of the game for the offline gamer is Dynasty Mode, which has been beefily upgraded since last year’s outing. The whole process of seeing seniors graduate, exporting them to Madden, recruiting blue-chip (and not-so blue-chip) freshmen, training your new team, resetting and adjusting your depth chart and so on is all now one slick mini-game between seasons. It’s far more detailed than last year’s version and never easy to master, even on the easiest setting.

That said, let’s nitpick the feature a bit.

First are the recruiting problems. While recruiting is a slick off-season mini-game in Madden, that hardly mimics real-world recruiting. Last year’s Sega college football game came closer to getting it right, allowing you to begin recruiting while playing through your season, going so far as to invite select blue-chippers to some of your home games as part of a campus visit. There’s none of that here.

Second is the lack of any aspect to the off-season OTHER than replacing your graduating (or otherwise moving on) players with freshmen recruits. In the PC game that EA Sports has “licensed” many of its ideas from, Front Office Football: The College Years, off-seasons include such activities as firing ineffective assistant coaches, replacing assistant coaches who are hired on by other colleges, hiring and firing regional scouts who are, to varying degrees, reliable or unreliable depending on their evaluatory strengths and weaknesses, dealing with ticket price and budget issues and more.

This year’s Madden takes an NFL slant on many of these off-season gameplay options but they go completely unaddressed in NCAA Football 2004. Where’s the struggle to keep your students eligible by managing their time between classwork and football? In NCAA Football 2004, your draftees have incoming GPAs, but they never affect gameplay. In FOF:TCY, players who struggle academically because they practice too much can become ineligible, or even drop out, potentially crippling your team. That would add a wonderful new dimension but isn’t even attempted here.

Heck, living next door to Minnesota, I can tell you one of the best ongoing dramas in college football can be – ta-da! – stadium issues! Just like in the NFL! Sure, a college team can’t relocate, which makes the feature fun in Madden, but what about a winning coach who just won a major bowl game who lays down the ultimatum, “Either the university builds my team a new stadium, or next year I’ll be coaching in Tennessee!”

You get the idea…

Another odd weakness of Dynasty Mode is the setting of your nonconference schedule; if you’re a Wisconsin or Minnesota and want to play Notre Dame, all you have to do is select that college in a given week in Preseason Options. The EA Mafia ensures it’s a done deal, no matter what Notre Dame’s schedule is already like. Again, Sega did a better job last season, incorporating a “negotiation mode” in which your ability to land a Notre Dame game is not an automatic; even winning a national championship didn’t guarantee you an automatic yes from the Fighting Irish the next season. So you know you did something special if your team is finally able to win a home-and-home series against the Fighting Irish – unless, of course, you’re already a top team under Notre Dame’s favor, such as UCLA or Boston College. Lots of room for improvement here, too, EA.

Another frustration is that, when you begin the game, all players on all teams are just uniform numbers. They have no “identity.” Sega solved this last year in their NCAA College Basketball game by simply offing the option, “Generate names?” at the start of their career mode. Sure, once you get through your first season, anyone you recruit will be given random names and by the time you end your fourth season, pretty much all your team will have players with names; so why not just offer the option to name players right up-front and get away from that terrible “you may be the best QB this college has ever seen, but you’re just ol’ number eight to me” feeling. Seems like a no-brainer.

Finally, there’s no sense of random events in NCAA College Football 2004. Where’s the feature that suddenly tosses you a curve ball that messes up your team, such as a player who gets depressed and drops out of football because his girlfriend dumped him, or another who gets a season-ending accident – due to drunk driving? Let’s not even mention the darker possibilities we’ve seen over the past summer in national sports news. These random events should not be frequent, but they should be in there. They’re not.

All the constructive criticism aside, NCAA Football 2004 is more than simply “the only college football title out this year.” It’s also pretty darn fun. In some ways, it’s to Sega’s advantage they didn’t put out a college title this year; the bar has been set pretty high and perhaps taking a season off to re-tool is exactly what Sega needs to come back next year and really give EA a run for their money.

In the meantime, no one who buys NCAA Football 2004 from EA is going to feel they’re getting an inferior product due to the lack of competition; Sega version or no, EA Sports would likely still be “the best college football title of the year.”

*screenshots are from the GameCube version

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Tags: NCAA Football 2004

Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Sep 3rd, 2003 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, PC Reviews, PS2 Reviews, Reviews, Xbox 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.

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