by:	July 24, 2005

I will be honest with you. I probably review and play nearly 100 games a year, but a genre that I have never been terribly familiar with is football games. I will admit; I am not an expert when it comes to football games but, NCAA Football 2006 has a sensibility to it that would get any college football fan excited. There are a few things in the game that will bother you, and of course it still isn’t as good as “big brother” Madden, but it is still a great effort.

The main part of the game is “Race for the Heisman mode”. As it implies, you go from a high school football player into a college athlete racing along with his team to get the Heisman. It is pretty quick and easy to go from the high school to a college, as you will get offers or you can pick your own. From there you edit things in your profile such as appearance, weight, hometown, and college. It helps to add some variety, but the character models you can choose from are pretty limited. Of course, most football players begin to look similar no matter the color or size when you are looking at them from an aerial view. Then from there you can go to your dorm room were you can check all your stats, practice, your team’s schedule, look at fanmail and more. There are some issues with how the stats work and how the entire system works, making it extremely difficult even for the initiated to get ahead. While I’m not an expert at the football titles, I had many friends play it that are that just couldn’t see why it was so hard to upgrade their stats. The coolest thing of the “Race for the Heisman mode” is that after done, you can import your career to Madden 2006.

Passing and receiving in the game is done pretty well. You have a few mishaps every so often that will leave you scratching your head as to how the player didn’t have an enough time to get the cursor of where the football was going, but overall you will connect the majority of your throws. The defense when you pass can be pretty tricky, as if though the AI in the game is actually watching your style of play. When your team is closer to the goal line, in some cases depending on the difficulty it will become near impossible to even get a pass off. When running the ball you can also do quite a few things to break the tackle line, and find ways through that if you get used to the game makes it increasingly easier to baffle the AI. The game is still formed for any football fan though, with you simply press a corresponding player button to pass, run down the line, and pressing a few buttons at the right time to roll, and break.

On the defense side, your team will for the most part get the guy down as long as you have at least two people standing around the receiver of the ball. In many instances if you don’t do this, the AI will simply take off with the ball with no obstacles, unrealistically making it down half the football field and scoring. There are of course quite a bit of training modes and mini-games to help you hone your skills in any area, and to make the game easier to get into with any new additions from the previous versions. There is a feature were the crowd will rattle the controller of the offending player, and in turn also help to rattle the team. If it is your home turf you can calm them down if you are on offense, or rile them up a bit if on defense.
Online play is pretty basic, but it still gets the job done. You can choose quick matches, quick tourneys, and optimatch. You have a career online also that keeps track of how you have been doing against other people. There really isn’t nothing much else to it other than the experience of playing with someone else online. Still, there is nothing to complain about either other than the occasional lag.

The visuals in the game are for the most part done well. The menus have a sense of “this isn’t the big time, but you’re getting there”. The in-game visuals are pretty well done, although you aren’t going to get the same detail or effects you would get in Madden. The players do have pretty fluid motion though, and it helps to add more to the realism. The mascots in the game, while not very important are the best example of the game’s shortcoming as it doesn’t even look like enough attention to detail was put on them to help them represent their own schools. The game has a good visual package overall though supporting regular and 16:9 resolutions along with 480P, even though it suffers from some slowdown. The music in the game is hit or miss with the mix of rock and older R&B songs. The game also has the fight songs for all the schools. When playing the actual game though there isn’t a lot of variety in the music, but it is playing closer attention to the sounds of the crowd and players. The commentary is done pretty well, with plenty of whitty-banter and even some hints, but it can get old or repetitive at times.

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NCAA Football 2006 offers a lot to the player. You have a game that is of course the best in EA’s NCAA line—tons of options and ways to play, customization, and so on. If you are a casual gamer who can wait for Madden you should probably just wait, otherwise if you are hardcore into football or college football for that matter you should at least give the game a rent.

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