By JJ Miller (The Phanatic Magazine)
Lets be honest. EA Sports has set the bar high with its football games. Much like cold pizza, even a subpar effort is still better than most.
Not that NCAA Football 13 is a bad game. Quite the opposite; it is another solid effort to bring the excitement of college football into the palm of one's hands in the comfort of their own living room. However, we know what the company is capable of and that makes some of the minor faults that much more
annoying.
EA made a big effort this year in improving the presentation of the game. College football is a religion all its own and the NCAA games have been making an effort to capture that the best it can. For this year's game, that includes new stadiums and a traditional pregame confetti like mascots, military parachutists for Army, Navy and Air Force as well as icons like the Texas cheerleaders and USC Song Girls.
The game also promotes authentic stadium sounds, recorded at actual games, but even in front of my decent home entertainment setup, I never really got the feel that the stadiums were buzzing. Sure, the shaking of the controller and mangling of the routes shown on screen pre-snap are nice as my Temple Owls invaded Beaver Stadium to battle Penn State, but it never seemed to affect things on the whole.
No quarterback jitters, players not being able to hear the playcalling, nothing of that sort.
Of course, it is impossible to capture a real college atmosphere on a disc, but there is still plenty of work to be done.
And while the game itself looks solid, especially the tackling and punishing of receivers going across the middle, the replays shown to mimic actual broadcasts are embarrassing. More often than not, players on a replay look as though they are gliding across the grass rather than running, a simple flaw that ruins the entire replay system.
It is a shame the replays are so flawed, because the actual in-game graphics are great. Quarterbacks move and throw with life-like quality and new animations for scrambling, sack avoidance and shovel passing are excellent.
Receiver awareness also gets a boost as you simply can't throw the ball to a player at any time. If, for say, a receiver is running a post route and you try to get it to him before he makes his cut, he won't be expecting the ball and it will go right by him.
Another great touch is the animations for wet weather. Many times I tried to hit my receivers as they were about to make sharp cuts to the inside or outside, only to see them slip to the ground as the ball headed in their direction.
NCAA Football 13 also makes full use of its partnership with ESPN, but not without some annoying habits that are to be expected when the "World Wide Leader of Sports" gets involved in something.
What the game does do well is the use of a sports ticker at the bottom that updates in real-time with your game during Dynasty play. Late afternoon games will flash final scores from earlier games and start times for the nightcaps while keeping you up to date on current contests.
Even sponsorship drops (Brought to you by Coke Zero!) aren't that repulsive as they make the presentation very lifelike.
What doesn't work is the studio updates with Rece Davis. They feature a box score and many repetitive generic statements from Davis and can get especially coarse when they feature the same game over and over.
Erin Andrews is also wasted as she does not appear on screen and her sideline reports are very generic. It continues to confuse why the commentators are programmed to use school's names instead of "both teams" or "the coach said."
The Dynasty mode, a staple for us geeks who want to take over a program, is once again solid and recruiting is so much fun you may at times want to skip the actual games just to move onto the next stage of trying to land top prospects.
After zeroing in on your targets and doing some preseason scouting and scholarship offering, inseason recruiting sees you get three "hours" of time a week to scout your recruits and addition hours to make phone calls in an attempt to talk up your school or trash others in a number of different categories, including new topics such as coach stability, stadium atmosphere and playing style, the latter one of a few topics whose rating for a school is updated week-to-week.
If shaping a roster isn't your thing, the Road to Glory mode allows you to take over a single player and shape his college career, actually starting in high school. A player picks his position (you can even put yourself on the field more often by giving yourself an offensive and defensive position) and racks up stats in high school games to noticed by schools during recruitment.
The career continues once a player has moved on to college and a player is given a host of goals to accomplish.
NCAA Football 13 also marks the first time that real-life players are in the game thanks to the Heisman Challenge.
Similar to the Road to Glory, a player can select from a handful of Heisman legends, including coverboys Barry Sanders and Robert Griffin III as well as Marcus Allen, Herschel Walker, Doug Flutie and Desmond Howard amongst others, in an attempt to duplicate their award-winning season through an
accomplishment of goals.
You can also place the legends on any team (welcome to Temple Barry) and the mode includes over 60 video interviews in which the greats talk about their careers.
It's a great bonus for college football fans, assuming they can overlook some f the graphical and sound flaws to the game.
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