The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Yeah, I’m still messing around with NCAA 2005. I can’t help it. I’m at the love/hate stage with the game and I don’t see it veering away from that. I say I’m done playing it; I then take two days off and then get flustered with the fact that I have a new NCAA game in my game library and force myself to try it again. “THIS time, it’ll be better.” (That’s me talking to myself.)

So today, that’s what I did. I took a break from playing games on Noggin.com with my daughter and since I just got done with a big real life work project I decided to take the day off (granted working from home…that’s not a huge stretch). I played some ESPN and I’m REALLY digging that game and I’ll go into a lot more detail on ESPN in a later blogging, but there was NCAA 2005. Staring at me. ‘Come on, Bill..you LOVED me last year. You posted slider settings, house rules, you went above and beyond the call to love me last year. You can do it! I need your attention, Bill. I’m NCAA FOOTBALL 2005 for crying out loud. Love me!!”

I caved.

I fired up my Ohio State dynasty and took on the Penn State Nittany Lions at the Shoe.  We’re 7-0, and ranked #1 in the nation, after a very good game vs Wisconsin that I won 24-23.  (It was by far the most fun I have had with NCAA 2005 so I figured hey, let’s give it another go.)

Well, NCAA isn’t going to make it easy, that’s for sure. The Penn State game had all of them. All of the reasons this game drives me INSANO–it had them all.  Here’s a list, and I know this is all old news but this is all very theraputic for me, so cut me some slack.

1) The Penn State KICKER was suspended for SEVEN games, and so they used their backup QB to kick field goals. He went 0-4, missed an extra point, and Penn State lost 14-13. The guy could not kick it over 20 yards with the slider maxxed out for CPU distance. What fun!

2) OSU WR Santonio Holmes, an extremely talented WR for the Buckeyes, dropped 5 passes.  TE Ryan Hamby dropped 4 passes and Roy Hall bobbled only 2. So QB Justin Zwick goes 12-31 but could have easily went  23-31, but hey–drops DO happen so let’s say it’s a realistic game and let’s say the OSU receivers drop 4 passes total. Zwick goes 19-31 for a little over 200 yards with a TD and an INT and everything looks just fine. But no. My receivers like to drop passes that hit them right dead square in the hands even when there isn’t a defender within 3 strides of them. Man I’d be ok if they’d drop these passes because they get HIT, but ARGH. Surely EA Sports can do better than this to just make them drop these passes for no reason at all is infuriating.  When this happens in real football fans give a collective “Ahh!! No!” while in NCAA you say, “Sigh. Another one..”

If these were bad players I’d be more understanding but Holmes is GREAT. Hamby is GREAT. Hall ..well Hall is good. But you get the idea.  And spare me the bullet pass/you need more touch/ you just can’t play the game right rhetoric. It’s bunk.  

3) Penn State QB Zack Mills was on fire! He was throwing darts all around the field and managed to go a BLISTERING 9/30 for 195 yards. 

Right when I think I have this game figured out, right when it flirts with being a good game—it shows that in fact, it’s not.  The real kicker is that I know that I won’t stop playing it, fiddling with this or that trying to make myself have fun with a game that is fighting me every step of the way.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2004 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.