NCAA Football 08: A Deep Dive into the Virtual Gridiron
NCAA Football 08 delivers college football action, with the thrill of managing a team, recruiting players, and experiencing the highs and lows of a season. From live weather conditions and ESPN news tickers to the excitement of trophies and video replays, the game aims to capture the essence of college football. But does it succeed?
Gameplay and Features
NCAA Football 08 offers a variety of ways to engage with the game. You can jump into a quick game, test your skills in mini-games, play through an entire season, challenge friends online, or hone your abilities in practice. The Dynasty Mode lets you manage an entire football team, recruiting players and coaching games.
A standout feature is the Super Sim mode, which allows you to simulate gameplay while still having the option to jump back in for crucial moments. You can save pictures and videos of your games, replaying them later or sharing them with friends.
Dynasty Mode: Building a Legacy
In Dynasty mode, you pick a school, redshirt some players, adjust your schedule, and then run some drills. These drills, which are the same as the spring drills, will let you boost the attributes of a select few players. That means you'll have to decide whether to give that senior QB a shot at improving his accuracy with the hope that he'll be able to bring home the title, or if you should plan for the future and let that redshirt freshman get a shot. Speaking of redshirts, you can now request a medical redshirt for a player who is injured early in the year.
Recruiting receives a significant overhaul, providing a more hands-on experience. You select 35 players to focus your efforts on, rank them, and then call them on the phone to establish a relationship. Once you've got them on the phone, you choose from a variety of topics to discuss with your recruit. You can talk about your school's fans, TV coverage, athletic facilities, tradition, and more. Your school is ranked in each category, so you'll want to pick your program's strengths and hope they match the interests of your player. If he's feeling your pitch, a football icon at the top of the screen will smile; if you're not on the same wavelength, the icon will frown, and eventually, the player will hang up on you. Once you've garnered significant interest from the recruit, you can schedule a campus visit and up to three activities during the visit. You'll want to pick the things the recruit is most interested in, which is why you should find out what the player feels is important about his college experience when you've got him on the phone. But you've only got 10 hours per week to talk, and each pitch you select takes several minutes off the clock, so you'll need to budget your time wisely. You can offer a scholarship at any time, which the player can accept right away, mull over, or reject based on his interest level. If you're having a hard time nailing down a commitment, you can make promises to the player. This option is only available in the offseason and lets you promise playing time, personal accolades, or even championships to the player. If you make good on a promise, your integrity rating goes up and you're given access to more promises. If you fail to keep your promise, your integrity goes down and your promises won't carry much weight.
Read also: Xbox 360's NCAA Football 14: A Retrospective
During the season you'll be able to keep tabs on your team as well as the other top teams in the nation and even the Heisman race in the ESPN The Magazine feature. Winning the Heisman and other awards is more meaningful than ever this year, because you can now admire the fruits of your labor in your school's shrine--a large trophy room that displays your trophies, unlocked pennants, and even snapshots you've saved from in-game replays.
Campus Legend Mode: From High School Star to College Great
If you're not in the mood to take the reins of an entire program, you can create a high school player in campus legend mode. Once you've picked your position and school, you'll find yourself in your state's playoffs. You've got extra incentive to win and play well because scouts are at each game rating your performance. When the playoffs are over, you're presented with a list of schools that are interested in your services, as well as where you rank on their depth chart. At first, you're not going to be a starter at a top-25 school. To move up the depth chart, you'll have to attend practice. Here, you're given 10 reps and you earn points for successful plays. When you've got enough points, you'll move up on the depth chart. This might sound like a lot of work, but even if you're the fifth-ranked player at a position, you can take the starting spot in a matter of weeks, and once the job is yours, you can't lose it.
Not only will you have to attend practice, but you'll also have to make decisions on how to spend your free time. These choices are presented in a "choose your own adventure" format. You will have you decide what to eat, whether or not to play darts, how long to study, and when to hang out with your friends. If you make a good decision, you'll often be rewarded with attribute boosts, but if you choose poorly, you can find yourself with bad grades or even injured. Thankfully, actually playing in games makes up for the somewhat uninteresting time between them. You'll only play when your player is on the field, which is nice because you can breeze through games in no time at all. Because you're the player and not the coach, you might not get the ball every time, but it's always fun to get it through a key block that springs another player for a touchdown. The camera focuses on your player, and while it does a decent job of keeping up with you, it often doesn't show enough of the field around you, which is frustrating when it causes you to run into a defender just offscreen.
Gameplay on the Field
The game's action on the field during regular game modes, such as exhibition and dynasty, doesn't feel much different from last year. For the most part, this is a good thing. The controls are tight, and it's easy to quickly adjust your defense or call hot routes on offense thanks to clever use of both analog sticks. The right analog stick is also used to nice effect during plays. On offense, you can flick the stick to juke and use it to go high or low to deliver bone-crushing big hits. The game moves at just the right speed; not too fast and not too slow. One of the best things about playing college football games is running the option, and NCAA 08 does it well. However, quarterbacks almost never make a bad pitch, even when they're being hit by two players and flinging the ball backward over their shoulder.
The playbooks are deep, but because you can pick plays based on Lee Corso's recommendation, play type, and formation, it's not too tough to navigate. If you dig deep enough into the playbook, you'll find that trick plays have been added this year. Like play action, these trick plays stand a decent chance of working against a human opponent but are worthless against the CPU.
Read also: The Future of College Football Games
At any point during the game, you can choose the super sim option and skip a single play, an entire possession, quarter, or game. If you choose to simulate more than one play, you can interrupt at any time should things start to go poorly. This is a fantastic option for people who don't like playing defense (or offense), as well as those who want to skip the end of blowouts. It's also great for people who enjoy playing multiple years of dynasty mode, but who don't necessarily want to simulate an entire game or play every snap of every game either.
Visuals and Presentation
Visually, NCAA 08 doesn't look much different from last year, which includes the sponsor logos that stick out like sore thumbs. There are more stadiums included this time around. While there are some inaccuracies here and there, the stadiums look great. The stands are packed with rabid fans, and mascots still patrol the sidelines. But it's what's not here that makes NCAA 08 feel a lot like a pro game; namely referees, marching bands, fans with signs or painted faces, and cheerleaders that detract from the college football feel. Other than some nasty clipping issues, the players look great. There are a wide variety of body types, so it's easy to tell the difference between a running back, offensive lineman, and tight end. But even more impressive than how they look is how the players move. Player animation is outstanding, and you'll be seeing moves for the first time a dozen games into your first season. Running backs will slink through the grasp of would-be tacklers; defensive players will team up for vicious gang tackles; and wide receivers will leap, snag the ball with one hand then crash to the ground.
The main menu screen is home to the biggest change in the game's presentation this year. The background screen is your school's trophy room, complete with trophy cases, video screens, and banners. You can fill this shrine by winning titles, individual player awards, and rivalry games. Each trophy is re-created with a detailed 3D model that you can view from all angles while Chris Fowler gives you a bit of history about the trophy. The main video screen shows in-game highlights that can be saved at any point during a game, and the screens on either side show still photos that are acquired the same way. The trophies and highlight reels are a cool way to remember great plays from the past, as well as a welcome addition to the series.
Audio
The commentary from Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, and Brad Nessler provides nice chemistry and offers a bit of in-depth analysis. As usual, the fight songs in the game sound great.
NCAA Football 08 on PS2 and Xbox
The PlayStation 2 and Xbox version of NCAA Football 08 didn't get many new features this year, but it's still a great game if you don't own NCAA 07. By now PlayStation 2 and Xbox owners have a pretty good idea of what to expect when it comes to the latest version of their favorite sports franchises. They know the games will look and play pretty much the same as they did the previous year, but there's always the question of what features from the current generation have trickled their way down to these older console versions. When it comes to NCAA Football 08, the answer to that question is, "Not much." If you've been away from the series for a while or you're new to it entirely, NCAA 08 is worth a look, but there's very little here to warrant a purchase if you already own last year's game.
Read also: Is NCAA Football 13 Still Worth Playing?
NCAA 08 plays as great as ever. When compared to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game, NCAA 08 on the Xbox and PS2 gives you quite a bit to do; however, you're looking at pretty much the same options as last year's PS2 and Xbox games. You can play a rivalry or mascot game, scrimmage, practice, and participate in spring drills. The spring drills, which test your skills in nearly every position, are a great way to learn the game, but they're old hat for NCAA Football veterans. New this year is points pursuit, which is basically football with an arcade twist. You'll see more over-the-top plays here, and you're awarded points for big plays on both offense and defense. It's interesting, but it doesn't add much to the game as a whole. You can try to become an all-time great in campus legend mode. Here you start with a high school player, perform a series of drills in front of scouts, pick your school, and then try to balance academics and athletics by playing games, going to practice, taking tests, and choosing how you spend your free time. Again, it's fun but nothing really new.
Online play is back, and it's largely unchanged. There are a healthy number of options, and you can even check out the latest sports news via the ticker that runs across the screen or by reading articles from ESPN.com. Online play works well, though we did suffer a bit of lag that made it tough to kick accurately. Dynasty mode has received some tweaks and changes, but in what's a recurring theme for the game, it doesn't play much differently. Recruiting didn't get the same makeover as the PS3 and Xbox versions. You'll pick players to focus your efforts on and divvy up how many hours you want to spend interacting with each player. You can even make promises to players such as a particular jersey number or position, but unless you want them to transfer to another school you'll want to keep your word.
On the field NCAA 08 shows the benefit of being the eighth game in the series on the PS2 and Xbox. The gameplay is very refined and in many ways is better than that of the 360 and PS3, even if it is more arcadelike. The game moves at just the right speed; it's neither too fast nor too slow, but lots of points are scored. On the offensive side of the ball you now have the ability to run trick plays like the hook and ladder and the Statue of Liberty. These are mostly novelties, though, since busting them out against the CPU is usually a disaster. Other than the trick plays, the playbooks are largely unchanged. This is good because there are tons of plays, but after seeing how well-organized they are on the 360 and PS3 it's disappointing that the play-calling interface wasn't improved here. The controls are tight, and the ability to shrug off would-be sacks by flicking the right analog stick is a nice touch (if you're the QB--it's superfrustrating if you're the person who missed the tackle). There haven't been a lot of changes to how the game plays defensively. You can actually block field goals and punts, which is nice. Before the snap you can move defenders to protect the area around the first down maker; this alleviates those frustrating moments where the soft part of your defense always seems to be where the first down is. Scrambling quarterbacks are still tough to deal with, but you can instruct your linebackers to shoot around the offensive line to keep the QB in the pocket. Sadly, super sim, one of the best features of the 360 and PS3 version because it lets you skip ahead one play, a whole possession, quarter, or even an entire game, is nowhere to be found here.
Visually, NCAA 08 doesn't look much different from last year, but that's OK because it really captures the college football atmosphere. The stands are packed with rabid fans who can shake the screen when they get fired up; marching bands that blare their school's fight song; and cheerleaders who jump, cheer, and even fire off cannons. Even the pregame, where Lee Corso dons the mascot's head of the team he's predicting, is here. None of this is new, but these little touches are what set the game apart from Madden, and they're a big reason why NCAA 08 is great. The players look very nice, too. There's a wide variety of body types, so it's easy to tell the difference between a running back, offensive lineman, and tight end. But even more impressive than how they look is how they move. Player animation is outstanding, even if it doesn't look much different than before. Both the Xbox and the PS2 versions have a widescreen option, but only the Xbox has progressive scan support. The Xbox game also has better-looking players and an overall cleaner look, making it the better looking of the two. NCAA 08 does a great job of capturing the excitement of a big college football game.
Did you like how last year's game sounded? If you did, and you weren't sick of the commentary from Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, and Brad Nessler, you'll like how 08 sounds because it's pretty much the same. The trio has nice chemistry and offers a bit of in-depth analysis, though they do get behind from time to time. Corso's goofiness has also been toned down a bit. This means you're less likely to hear him repeat his silly sayings, but those sayings are kind of his appeal, so it's a bit disappointing. As usual, the fight songs in the game sound great, though you might go insane by the time you hear your school's fight song for the 200th time.
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