So here's my NCAA 07 for the Xbox 360 review. The first draft was selected as one of three "reviews of the week" by the Community Contributions Union when first published. Then I tried to edit the review a little bit and the formatting got all screwed up and... urgh.
Gamespot is persona non grata (if a website can be that) after the Gerstmann fiasco, anyway.
Anyway:
If football is a metaphor for war, NCAA 07 for the Xbox 360 is a metaphor for football.
Let us refine this syllogism.
Do you remember the last game of American Football you watched on television? Let us specify further, as many of us watch games in noisy bars - do you remember the last game of American Football you HEARD on television or radio? Invariably, the play-by-play and color guys frequently invoked the images and symbols of armed conflict - coaches are "generals," linemen "struggle" in the "trenches," quarterbacks "hit their targets" with "pinpoint accuracy," linemen "crush" running backs with "brutal tackles."
It's not just the announcers, of course. The players are just as steeped in the vocabularies and cadences of military conflict: Kellen Winslow Jr. infamously declared himself "a fucking soldier!" while attending University of Miami (or "the U") a college many people mistakenly believe is a state penitentiary.
Better, less annoying players express the same sentiment in more articulate, less terrifying ways. Recently, with the esprit de corps of a veteran platoon, Ricky Manning Jr. and a handful of UCLA players attacked some dude with a laptop at a Denny's. This group of players - a "band of brothers," if you will - brutally pummeled this guy because they believed he engaged in "nerd activities" that greatly offended their code of honor.
Or something like that. The whole incident was pretty surreal.
I am not trying to scare you away from NCAA '07 by suggesting that Ricky Manning Jr. will hunt you down and pummel you for playing games - although you never know, he's pretty batshit crazy. I'm trying to make a point.
Athletic competition has always been linked with military conflict, from the Athenian Olympics to Celebrity Fit Club - hell, the physical trainer on that show is a former drill sergeant. The best soldiers on the battlefield usually possess the same skills as the best football players: raw athletic ability; a knack for making quick decisions; loyalty to comrades; respect for the chain of command; and a quixotic sense of honor and duty. Men of this sort would be superfluous, even dangerous, during that brief period of unipolar American supremacy if it were not for the glories of the gridiron - glories, ironically, substantially greater than the glories available to them on the battlefield.
This is the important thing to realize: football is an abstraction of war. Which makes NCAA 07 an abstraction of an abstraction.
Creative people would use this opportunity to explore the inherent tension in any videogame of a real sport; look to Japan, where the best-selling baseball simulations star a race of obese, deformed men with gigantic heads. And these are licensed games, too: imagine an American basketball game, licensed by the NBA, in which LeBron James looked like a generic Bobblehead Doll all the time. [Note: Konami's Power Pro Baseball is out in the US now.]
EA Sports is working in the opposite direction, valiantly striving towards photorealistic player models, fluid lifelike movement, and flawless recreations of all the Division I football stadiums in the country. They are striving to develop a perfectly accurate physics engine. They are striving to re-create every aspect, from recruiting to discipline to running practice, that a college head coach must deal with every week. They haven't stopped to wonder if this is actually a good idea.
Now, don't get me wrong, there should be realistic football games on the market - games that both look and feel like real football games, if only to satisfy the onanistic joy of letting really fat people play something just like the real game. EA Sports, in my opinion, isn't the company to do it, because the conventions and rules of the Madden gaming experience have become so entrenched, change seems heretical (see the backlash the "realistic" passing cone generated in Madden '06). But, while we are nearing a time when every EA football player will look EXACTLY like the real deal, we're stuck in the Uncanny Valley with this edition.
What is the Uncanny Valley? To give you an idea of what I mean, let me tell you a story about Sensible Soccer. It is a series of soccer games popular in Britain. In one of the earlier games in the series, a collection of pixels meant to represent a famous black footballer (I think it was Ince) appeared more like a white midget with a grotesquely large ginger colored afro.
That is comedy. If this same gaffe were to happen today, it would be tragic.
Although EA does at least get the race correct for all the college football stars, and in some cases went to considerable effort to make the in-game models look just like the real players, it looks janky, a graphical abortion as outlandish as the old Sensible Soccer scenario.
Each player has a detailed face and a few different expressions, none of which look natural. A sacked quarterback looks almost exactly like a frowning clown. Cornerbacks follow the arc of a pass with the cold, lifeless eyes of a shark. No one quite moves their jaw. We are getting close enough to photorealistic graphics that the unrealistic flaws actually make this game look WORSE than the PS2/Xbox versions. And the inconsistent frame rate doesn't help matters any.
The game plays pretty much exactly like last year's Xbox game, with a few minor changes. The button mapping has changed significantly (resulting in numerous unintended juke moves, in my experience). The passing game still doesn't feel right, and running still feels too easy to me. To stop anyone, you're gonna have to throw 8 defenders in the box. Screen passing seems more effective than last year. The kick meter adopted the Tiger Woods analog golf swing approach, so whoopee for that, I guess. Jumping offsides is easier than ever, thanks to a "jump snap" button. The audible system has been overhauled and actually works now. The "stadium pulse" has been replaced with a "momentum" bar, an awkward and heavy-handed way to introduce "old man mo" into the game. Plus, paying the $10 more gives you an opportunity to complain to your friends about all the missing features, including create-a-school, career mode, &c available in the cheaper PS2 iteration.
This is just so depressing. We now have what are essentially supercomputers lying on our living room carpets, and EA Sports cannot think of anything better to do with all this power. The things I hate about all the Madden engine games from the PS2 onward feel like they've entered into the hallowed canon of great game design. I think that, with a few minor tweaks to the player models, EA could rename the game "Inertia Truck Football War" and no one would be the wiser. The (wonderful) Temco Bowl for the NES is closer to NCAA 07 than NCAA 07 is to accurately recreating the experience of watching (or playing in) a real college football game.
There isn't anything wrong with abstraction. At least there isn't anything inherently wrong with abstraction. I would rather have this abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction to quench my thirst for violence than face the cold reality of a real war zone. But don't pretend football and war are the same thing - and don't pretend NCAA 07 and a real college football game are the same thing.
FINAL SCORE: A STARS WARS TRADING CARD GAME INSTRUCTION BOOKLET
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