The Blog for the Sports Gamer

As I type this my 360 is sitting in a box in the back of some UPS Store room waiting for a ride to the airport. If Dan’s right (I’m sure that he is), I’ll be very pleased to have a replacement in-house by Friday. College Hoops, over the course of about five games, crashed two more times on me over the weekend. The first one, mercifully, was on the title screen, so no harm done. The second was seven minutes into the first half of a conferences tourney game. Very frustrating, but at this point I’m convinced these particular crashes (read errors) are the console and the not the game.

After getting stomped several times in a handful of games with default sliders at All-Conference level in my first season with Sacred Heart, I opted to try out some MOP sliders I ripped from DSP, which were themselves ripped from OS (a Jistic slider set for the Xbox version, I believe). Not surprisingly, using an MOP slider set on All-Conference made the game far too easy (could hold the AI to under 35% shooting while hitting 60+% myself), but after bumping it up to All-American (one game so far) I think there’s some promise to these.

That one game was a Round 1 NCAA tourney game, Sacred Heart vs. Oklahoma State (I won the conference tourney after simming the regular season). It was a very fun game, in which the lead see-sawed a lot in the first half, but saw OSU make a run early in the second. I was able to close the gap and even tie the score at one point, but then OSU made another run and I just couldn’t hang. I lost, I think, by about ten points after going stone-cold trying to force plays late in the second half. Good stuff. There really is no better experience in video hoops than working an open three-point shot in College Hoops 2k6 and nailing it.

At this point I’m still just futzing around with stuff in the game. I really would like to see VC revamp the recruiting a little. I think it’s a good base and offers a lot of depth, but at the same time I still can’t abide the weekly tedium. The assisted recruiting option and the ability to designate targets are both a nod in the right direction, but I think more can be done to eliminate the tedium of a full-season of weekly emails, phone calls, scouting visits, etc. Some examples:

- The target list is 15 players long and it’s numbered, but you can’t seem to designate priorities between those players (if you can, someone please tell me how). How about being able to rank your targets so that when you have assisted recruiting on they focus their time/points on your preferred target players first?

- When using assisted recruiting it needs to be made much more clear what my assistants are doing with their time. A weekly “this is what I did” email would not be out of line and would give a clear indicator of whether or not they can be trusted to run the show for Legacy players that don’t want the level of involvement the game offers.

- Taking that a step further, I think it would help a lot if you could just set a recruiting plan for your targets and let the assisted recuiting handle the scheduling details. I’d rather just set a target recruit and enable a checkbox that says what I want my assistants to do before that phase of recruiting ends and leave it at that. Not having to go in and make ten phone calls every week, no weekly emails to everybody with a pulse (w/o really knowing if it has an effect or not), etc. The AI would just know to do it and would be far more capable of knowing how to balance its time/point allotment to make sure it could bring everybody in. At that point all you need is to review your email each week and decide if the results you’re getting require any changes to your core plan. If you get too ambitious have your assistant coach send you an email that says, “We can’t bring player x, y and z in before the end of the season. We have to narrow it down to two.”

- When getting reports on recruited players or reviewing the recruit’s information page, the game really ought to tell you if your efforts are having an effect. I can’t keep two numbers in my head for more than a second. Asking me to remember whether or not my target’s interest level of 76% is significantly higher than it was a month ago is sheer torture. One entry on the recruit’s page that indicates if his interest level has increased or decreased over the past week or month would pay huge dividends in deciding if a guy is worth the time/effort.

Ultimately, I think it would just be more effective for those of us who want to run a Legacy but dont’ want to spend more time recruiting than playing games if you could just spend an hour of gametime at the start of the season setting your recruiting plan and then just monitoring it between games for the rest of the year.

At any rate, all the great College Hoops gameplay is, without question, intact in the 360 version. If some of the glaring bug issues can be patched up (the OS thread I linked to last week indicated a patch was in the works) this will probably be the best College Hoops game to date. At the same time, however, I think it’s time for VC to raise the bar:

- The commentary and presentation, especially at conference and NCAA tourney time, need more work. When you win a conference tourney or or a big NCAA tourney game (not talking about just the finals) it shouldn’t just be same old same old from the players and an extra sentence or two of commentary. Nor should the favored team in an NCAA tourney team have an obvious advantage from the crowd, which this weekend’s real NCAA tourney action can confirm (go Bradley!). No way should Sacred Heart walk into an arena of a round 1 tourney game facing a crowd loaded with Oklahoma State colors, nor should the crowd be entirely in their corner. NCAA crowds, by and large, love the underdogs in the early rounds. We should see more of that in the game.

- I also like the concept of the News page in the Stats section, but it just doesn’t work as implemented. Most of the entries are very over done and they make every win sound ridiculously significant. A lot of it just reads hacky (being an editor this is a pet peeve of mine) and the “constructed” highlight reel (of one replay) just slows the console down (it takes like 30 seconds to load, during which you can do nothing but wait and it stops being neat after one viewing). That said, there are good points to the page text, in terms of referencing stats and such. But the real issue I have is that it doesn’t reference any of the most newsworthy stuff. When Sacred Heart wins a conference tourney and goes to the big dance there should be something about it beyond the usual game recap. If you land a big recruit, or have a player named an All-American there should be news about it. If there’s a week left in the season and you’re contending for a conference title there should be news about it. If you’re losing and you have a disgruntled player, how about a story with the player complaining to the press about lack of playing time? There’s loads of room to get creative here.

- Get more content on the screen. Roster management is the most frustrating aspect (for me) in any console team sports game. You cannot get all the information you want to see when you want to see it without a half-dozen back and forth button presses and a whole lot of scrolling. There wasn’t much to be done about that on standard definition consoles, but an Xbox 360 game should take better advantage of HD resolution so that you can put more information on screen at once without having to scroll for a virtual mile and a half.

- And to go beyond that point, you should be able to better customize what information you do get to see: That means more sorting options (the recruiting screen in College Hoops does quite well in this regard), but also the ability to generate custom views. Given the sheer number of gameplay sliders and options this can’t be that hard to do. Give us a screen with every stat and bio category in the game and let us choose (and save) what content we want to see. It would make roster management, much, much easier, especially if saved to a custom reports file that gamers could share amongst themselves. And as long as I’m having my cake and eating it too, why not export that stuff to a generic data file that could be imported into a spreadsheet or database on your PC (don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath for this).

- The Coach’s Clipboard: Don’t ever, EVER, cut that feature. Love it! I’ve still hardly used it, but I’ll dig into it more when I get my 360 back.

- Yes the sim engine may need work, but this is overanalyzed to death. If George Mason or Bradley made the Sweet Sixteen in College Hoops 2k6 gamers would be going bonkers, but obviously, it does happen. That said, a #1 seed should really never lose a first round game (#2’s, hardly ever). I know there are stat-balance issues with this, but I think the brackets would look better if games were decided based on a low seed’s odds of winning. A #1 vs. a #16 = .1% chance of the #16 winning. A #4 vs. a #12 might be 20%. A #8 vs. a #9 would just be 50-50. (I’m sure some stat nut has actual figures on how often low seeds get upsets.)

- It’s probably my imagination, but there still feels to me like there’s a bit of a mechanical rock, paper, scissors aspect to the on-court gameplay. A lot of the time it feels like if a player with x ability takes a shot contested to y-th degree it has zero chance of going in. Period. Like I said, I may just be as hallucinatory as the people convinced of the “catch up code” in the High Heat Baseball (no way), but College Hoops has always had that semi-predetermined feel to it. If I’m right it’s reasonably well hidden, I’ll grant VC that, but it just isn’t sports. Everything should be variable to some extent (if it’s not already).

I could go on, but really, are any of you still reading? If so, you deserve a cookie.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 11:29 am 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.