Padre’s Campus Legend: Part 1

*Click the thumbnails throughout to view the full size images. Highlight video follows at the end.

Pasta Padre’s legend in NCAA Football 08 begins in High School. He chose to begin there rather than taking on the place of a current college player. First was creating his background and position as well as his look. There are a ton of real cities available to choose from as the hometown. The uniform options were pretty standard. Not a great variety in player faces despite having something like 20 options per skin tone, although underneath a helmet that probably doesn’t really matter all that much.

When setting up the High School, there are a handful of color combinations to choose from for the school that is being “created”. Once named, it is added in to the State Championship bracket and it is time to being playing. All the other schools are made up from city names from the specific state you are playing in.

The focus in this mode is completely on your campus legend. The camera angle is tailored to him, and the game uses “Super Sim” through any plays that do not have him on the field. You’re able to sim from play to play, or you can go in and actually watch them happen.

Padre is a coverage CB, so the camera angle as seen from the screenshots/video is high up to begin and slanted towards the inside so as to see both the receiver and the action going on at the line of scrimmage. It gets lower to the ground once the play begins. There were times at first when I lost sight of the receiver I was covering completely off the screen. At that point you’re kinda screwed as a CB. As the game went on though I got more comfortable with it and covered better to where he was always on my screen.

Padre also got some action in on special teams as a gunner as well as blocking on returns. Again it was a little difficult at first to deal with the camera during kick return blocking but I was able to adjust some to that. As a gunner though it was way too easy to get away from any attempted blocks and head straight for the returner. At least the returner called fair catch every time I was approaching untouched.

So in this mode you don’t call any of the plays. While I usually tried to cover manually from start to finish each play, one nice thing is that you can let the CPU do some of the work. If you lay off the stick your player will run his assignment on his own. In man coverage he’ll stick with the receiver, in zone he’ll drop into his area.

Padre had a decent game, he wasn’t thrown at very much. Maybe two or three times. He jumped the route once but the pass hit him in the shoulder and he didn’t attempt to make the INT. He finished up with five tackles and a pass deflection. Padre High won 20-3 to advance in the tournament.

It is an adjustment playing from that perspective. A couple times I got overly excited and messed up cause of it, for example missing a tackle cause I chose to dive instead of square up or even go for a hit stick. It’ll just take some time for it to feel natural. Overall though it is light years better than Madden 07’s Superstar mode camera. This is definitely playable, although I suspect the CB will end up being one of the most difficult to play in this mode. I enjoy the challenge and am happy that it isn’t frustrating.

After the game it showed Padre’s stats and also what scouts were in attendance. Pittsburgh, Navy, and Texas Tech. Padre didn’t seem interested by any of those schools.

Below are a few highlights from the first game. The next update, which may not come until tomorrow, will likely recap the rest of the High School portion of Campus Legend. I’ll also be doing a post specifically showing the camera angle from EVERY possible position you can play in CL!