How do you take an age-old series where customization is limited, and make it seem cutting-edge enough for gamers to fork out $60 every year? Well NCAA Football 08 seems to have a good idea. Besides promising to go even deeper into the Dynasty mode, it’s returning and revamping the Career (or newly named Campus Legend) mode, which will enable you to create a player and build up their attributes all through college. After which, you can import them to Madden 08’s Superstar mode. During your college “life,” you can pick from a series of activities to do on the weekends, which can boost or reduce your attributes temporarily.
Will you be a legend?
If you think that is a great start, you should also know that visuals are expected to be ten times better than previous years with new mechanical features that will enhance the realism of the game. Also, now if you make a sweet play to win the game, you can save it and send it to a friend’s gamertag with an Xbox Live connection.
A feature completely new to the NCAA Football franchise is Leadership Control. Every team is composed with 2-7 ’star players.’ The morale of these players impacts the whole team. When these players score touchdowns or make a big play (depending on position), your whole team will play better. But on the other end of the spectrum, if they fumble or miss a tackle, your team will loose fatigue faster and start playing more slack of a game.
Other tweaks are being made to ensure a lifelike football experience as well. The publishers are saying they are adding some additional tricks to the playbook (fumblerusky, anyone?) But possibly, the biggest news is that the Weather Channel and EA have teamed up, so that current weather conditions will match the game weather conditions. Thirty-Six inches of snow in New-England? Oh well! Flooding in Florida? Prepare for kick-off!
Detailed Stadium Effects
With the games release less than a month away (7/7/07), we expect more information to be released about the title. So far, the game looks to be heading in the right direction. With a franchise that did not have a particularly strong next-gen console release, this looks like exactly what EA needs to put the NCAA Football series back on the map.
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