NCAA Football 10: A Deep Dive into the PlayStation 3 Experience

NCAA Football 10, released in 2009, aimed to capture the unique atmosphere and excitement of college football. This article delves into the PlayStation 3 version of the game, analyzing its gameplay, new features, graphics, audio, and overall value. While the series is often compared to its older and more popular brother Madden NFL, NCAA isn’t simply a reskinned prequel.

Gameplay: On-Field Action and Controls

The gameplay in NCAA Football 10 features both hits and misses. One of the first things you will notice when playing a game is that the controls are different but somehow felt more natural. Running the ball feels much more natural.

The number of plays is utterly astronomical. While the sheer number of plays can be overwhelming, the "Ask Corso" feature provides a helpful starting point, and the audible system allows for quick adjustments. Speaking of plays, there is are now “Setup” plays linked together. Perform one play well and you can use the linked (or setup) play to trick the defence for a big gain. There is also a “Family Play” set of controls which maps everything to one button.

A key addition is the "Setup" meter, which gauges the effectiveness of play-action passes based on the success of previous running plays. Run the ball with success consistently, and you’ll when you go to a play action pass, it will say something like “9% setup” or “87% setup” depending on how you are doing. The higher it is setup, the better chance of success (ie, with the play action, either the safety or corner biting and leaving the receiver open.) However, the fact there is no setup function for the defense leaves me scratching my head.

Another focus is on "pocket presence," with pre-snap controls to adjust the offensive line. One of the new pre-snap functions allows you to shift your lineman left, right, be aggressive, or sit back. In practice, this means they’ll hold on about every play and give you ridiculous amounts of time against all but a few D-lines. However, the interior running game may still be a little jumpy or automatic in its animations, and you see the occasional ball morph right through a player, but overall the game has done a better job than previous years in blending its animations.

Game Modes: Dynasty, Road to Glory, and Season Showdown

NCAA Football 10 offers a variety of game modes to cater to different play styles. In addition to “Play Now” and some mini-games (which really helped me pick up the nuances of the game), there are two (technically three) career modes to play through.

Dynasty Mode

Dynasty mode allows players to manage a college football program over 60 seasons, balancing on-field performance with recruiting. You juggle recruiting players for the future and dealing with winning a national championship. That’s basically all you do in dynasty. Play a game, recruit, play a game, recruit, finish season, sign recruits. If college football domination and micro-management are your thing, then you’ll get a lot out of it. Fortunately, there is a lot of CPU help to get you through the recruiting if you would rather play games.

A revamped recruiting tool addresses past frustrations, allowing players to focus on specific targets throughout the season. In Dynasty mode, my prayers have been answered with the recruiting tool. My biggest gripe had been that you spend as much time in menus recruiting during the season as actually playing football games. Now, the sim feature has been retooled. It will actually stick with the players you target to start the season, instead of abandoning a 5 star running back to go after the 2 star free safety because it thought you needed a safety more.

Road to Glory

Road to Glory, formerly Campus Legend, is a career mode where players create a high school athlete and guide them through their college career. There is also a revised Campus Legend feature (similar to NHL 09’s Be A Pro), now called Road to Glory. This is one of the big selling points because it’s hosted by Erin Andrews in a series of TV show style segments. Seriously, Erin’s name is all over the box and the PR material that EA Sports sent me. The only thing is that the title, which became a joke in the blogosphere, is now slightly inappropriate because of that Erin Andrews nude video. Anyway, Erin and Kirk Herbstreit host a show about your football career from your high school playoffs through your graduation with your actual game highlights and analysis. You’re recruited based on your high school performance though I was able to choose from every team. Your performance mostly determines your spot on the depth chart which you can move up by practising. You only play when the coach puts you on the field which can be frustrating but realistic. The newly skinned Road to Glory mode, has highlights of your created player's career complete with Erin Andrews video segments.

Season Showdown

Season Showdown is a new feature that adds an online competitive element, allowing players to earn points for their favorite school in a nationwide competition. You pick a Season Showdown team at the start of the game. Say you’re a big Florida State fan. FSU is your online dynasty team, your player in Road to Glory goes to FSU, etc. At the end of every game, all the points you accumulate will be sent to a central server and be added to FSU’s grand point total. It provides an extra bit of rivalry and just another reason to play the game.

Read also: College Football Gaming on PS2

You enter it by selecting your favourite team and every game you play after that earns points for your team. You can only pick a new team once so you can’t switch teams every week to screw over Notre Dame. The Showdown is a hard system to explain because how you play earns points for an online proxy for the real NCAA football season. Your objective is to earn points for your school by playing the game and you want to earn more points than your school’s real opponent that week. There are five areas to earn points in (games vs. CPU, games online, games vs. Showdown opponent, online voting, and online trivia) and the week’s winner has to outpoint their opponent in at least three areas. After the regular season is played through, a 32 team playoff starts with the winning school becoming the Season Showdown national champion.

TeamBuilder

Another standout feature is TeamBuilder, a robust team customization tool that allows players to create and share custom teams online. The power of college football dynasties is represented throughout NCAA 10, and you can build your own via online dynasties, the Season Showdown, and TeamBuilder modes to name a few. It's nice to get collectable points for playing CPU and human opponents in Season Showdown, but I was especially impressed with the TeamBuilder. I easily spent an hour (and could have spent an hour longer) creating my team with the online browser, and was impressed with the uniform options and control over the roster. You can write in your own names and even customize each player's skills.

EA took the team customization from the console to the PC, and made it perhaps the deepest customization system this side of RPGs. Getting your custom teams onto your PS3 or 360 is easy enough, though you have to pay to have more than 12 teams. You can create your own team from uniform to stadium to roster online and download them for your game. The customization of your team is better than any football or hockey game that I can remember.

Graphics and Presentation

While NCAA Football 10 improves upon its predecessors, the graphics receive mixed reviews. Last year, I noted how NCAA 09 was the first in the series that looked like it belonged on the PS3 and 360. It seems EA seemed fine with that, as the graphics have seen minimal improvements. The animations are hit or miss and the player models look identical to NCAA 09’s. From video of the new Madden NFL 10, it’s not reached that upper level though. The crowd doesn’t look good or lively. The in-game “broadcast” graphics still look like a video game rather than a TV broadcast.

The game does a better job than previous years in blending its animations. The menus and in-game interface are easy to navigate through an make my life easier, though I would like the ESPN ticker to look more ESPN-ish and to see the name/school of the fight song playing. Overall, the game looks very good. It’s not the best looking game EA has ever made but it’s a very respectable effort. Mind you, it could be because I’m using a PS3 on an SD TV.

Read also: Deep Dive into NCAA Football 13

There are some graphics glitches that show up every now and then. Helmets may load up as white every now and then. The refs are all non-existent except when calling a penalty. When you lose confidence in RTG and the routes start shaking to make them harder to read, there are noticeable flickering black lines in the coach cam. And speaking of RTG, I would have liked if the “set” had your team’s colours on there instead of Boise State’s. The RTG setup looks nice otherwise.

Audio and Commentary

The audio presentation in NCAA Football 10 is considered a weak point. There’s not much in the way of good things to say about the audio. The ESPN SportsCenter updates are too quiet compared to the fight songs that usually play. The commentary is nothing special. Erin Andrews’ sideline reports take too long and often force the commentators to skip a play as you would expect during a real game broadcast. But they didn’t make up for it like Dave Alter and I did when we ran into that calling UWO Mustangs football. I actually prefer the audio in the Road To Glory mode to the other game modes. In RTG, you don’t get commentary. Instead, you hear all the field noise, the crowd, and the PA announcer. Those are all well and good but where is the stadium music? It’s near silence between plays. There’s the obligatory fight song after every scoring play but there is almost no band or licensed music like you would actually get at a college football game.

Glitches and Irritations

Despite its improvements, NCAA Football 10 is not without its flaws. Sadly, glitches do rear their ugly head. The worst offender of this was if a shotgun snap went over my head, go 30 yards down field, and be called an incomplete pass. I’ve been playing this nearly nonstop since I got the game at midnight on the 13th and this error has happened around a dozen times. The glitches aren’t game breaking, but be prepared to have your hopes dashed by one at least once. There’s one thing overall that bothers me, though. It’s that you have to manually save rather than autosave. I just can’t understand why there isn’t an autosave feature for your game. It’s in every other EA game I’ve played in the last three or so years, why not this one? Maybe I missed an option in the menu but I lost a lot of progress on my first try at dynasty mode assuming there was an autosave function. And I do know that online dynasty has an autosave. And for that matter, why can’t I save mid-game?

tags: #ncaa #football #10 #playstation #3 #review