NCAA Football 06 Xbox Review

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NCAA and the NFL go hand in hand - most college players aspire to play in the NFL, and while this might appear to suggest the best gridiron on offer is found in the NFL, fans of the college game will be quick to differ on their opinion. The atmosphere, the rivalries, the heart and the determination are arguably unmatched in the NCAA, and it is EA's job each year to capture this in their concisely named NCAA Football series. 06, the latest version, was recently released, and while it fails tolive up to a few expectations, the representation of this fine sport is second to none in most regards.

The new big feature this year in NCAA Football 06 is Race for the Heisman mode. Basically, you make a player in a position of your choice (except offensive linemen), do an initial mini drill and choose which school to attend based on your offers. The better you perform in the drill, the better the offers will be. Drills differ depending on your position of choice obviously. In any case, once given a spot on a team, you play out your seasons as usual except you have no control over team management aspects such as recruiting and discipline - emulating the perspective in which you're playing, that is, the perspective of an individual player. You can access stats, schedules, fan mail etc from your dorm room, which is basically the RFTH mode's main menu.

The aim of RFTH is to, as you may have guessed, win the Heisman trophy. You have four years in college football to do it, and as you progress closer to this goal your dorm room will improve, and (believe it or not) your girlfriend will become more and more attractive (who is represented by a small photo in your dorm only, so there won't be any "Hot Coffee" slip ups by EA here). While the conceptof RFTH has a lot of promise, it is rather bland and basic. You play games like you would any - meaning you control everyone on the field and not just your created player. While this is probably a good idea gameplay wise, it doesn't do anything to make you want to play the mode itself, unlike SEGA's "First Person Football", which would probably work nicely in a mode like this. There is just really very little benefit in playing RFTH when you could easily "adopt" a freshman in the normal Dynasty mode to concentrate on while controlling the team's management at the same time. The only real benefit is for gamers who don't like managing recruiting and rosters, but if that's the case you only have 4 seasons of gameplay before you'd have to start over again, which go by pretty quickly.

With that said, the bread and butter of NCAA remains in the Dynasty mode - after all, the RFTH mode turns into the standard Dynasty mode once your 4 years as a college player are up. This year, the Dynasty mode hasn't seen a huge amount of improvements, but then again it was pretty darn good last year - without the need to cover areas like contracts, the draft, free agency, player agents, trade talks etc like in the NFL, one would think the management sidein a college game is boring but NCAA 06 make sure that isn't the case. The off season remains basically the same, but this year we see mid season recruiting. Some high school players will be looking for teams to take their college game to before their college career is even close to starting, soduring aseason you can attempt to attract their attention. You are given points to spend, and obviously the more you spend on any given player the more they will be interested, although other factors weight into each prospect's interest level, including location, team and coach prestige, and academics to name a few. On top of this, you can invite them to watch a home game of yours, and if you impress, your chances of recruitment will improve. By impress, I don't just mean win; a WR will like to see a good passing game, a HB a good running game and so forth.