NCAA Basketball 09

As well as just general blogging i plan to do some video game reviews, so my first one will be NCAA Basketball 09.  With the departure of 2K from the sports realm, we are once again left with one sports game in a sporting realm. In college basketball its EA's NCAA Basketball 09.  They managed to improve on many of the issues of the past.  This game uses the NBA Live engine this time around, which improves many things, character models, and ball physics mostly.  The animations look smooth, and the graphics look great.  All 328 Devision I teams are represented and MOST of the arenas look like good representations of their real-life counterparts.  I found the game's version of the Peterson Events Center looked a little akward, but most of the other venues look pretty close.

(Generic UCLA player is guarded by generic Oregon player.)

The player models look amazing, even on a standard-def TV, the graphics are great. My only issue, is the generic models, they are good(for people who are new to NCAA or college basketball in general) but since its against NCAA rules, real college players are not in the game. Can we just start paying college players please, so we can get real players in the game, and real jerseys on the shelves?

Now to the atmosphere, if there is one thing this game gets down well, its the atmosphere of a college game. The crowd chants and waves arms to try and get the away team to miss free-throws. When a game gets out of hand, the crowd starts chanting "WARM UP THE BUS!". All the mascots are in the game, up to their usual mascot antics.

This leads me to the sound, the sound is pretty good, but as with most sports games, the announcers get very repetitive, very fast. I love Dick Vitale, but his announcing doesn't seem like him, he doesn't talk about how awesome Pitt is like he does in real life.
ITS AWESOME, BABY!


The game adds a feature called "game tempo" which is a meter that pops up at the bottom of the screen, with 2 areas on it that represent the tempo that each team likes to play at, my team Pitt, is a balanced team, which means they are adept at playing a fast game or a slow game. I have switched them to be a "Half-Court" game which means they take it slow, using a lot of the shot clock, and getting high-percentage shots. When you play in your tempo, you get a slightly higher chance to make hard shots, and when your not in your tempo is a little harder to make low-percentage shots.

Overall this is a very good game, a major improvement on the last few NCAA games. But, this is the hard part, I always have trouble recommending sports games to people because its hard to tell someone to buy a game that you know will have improvements next year. I would say that if you REALLLLY need to buy a college basketball game, you should buy it, otherwise rent it and see what improvements they make next season.