Live Blog: NCAA Football 09

1201: Was playing Shopmaster from MaddenWars but hopped off to start the live blog. Heading into the 4th quarter he held a 26-7 lead (my defense could not get a stop). Have a few notes already and will add them shortly. Got a couple short video clips for tonight also.

1207: Got a late start due to the 360 I sat down at having the red rings. My luck! Plus I was sick this morning but I’m feeling much better now.

1210: I’m attempting to upload a few short video clips now. We’ll see if I can get them up soon.

1211: Husky Stadium is not the best place to play a snow game. While it looks great on the field, the track surrounding the field looked terrible.

1213: Overall the gameplay is more constricted. It still has the wide open feel but the acceleration that led to so many big plays seems to have been toned down.

1215: At this point I can’t really go in and directly answer some of the questions you guys have posed. I will try and get time later to seek some of them out.

1216: Could just be a coincidence, but so far I’ve seen less turnovers even in the head-to-head. Just one INT thrown by Shopmaster and I was immediately tackled. Can’t say for sure that the INTs for TD issue from last month has been resolved, though with the overall feel of acceleration not being as extreme I suspect it is at least improved. 

1217: I’ll look into Campus Legend more tonight, but my understanding was that the only significant changes were that you can stay in an activity such as practice and do the whole week’s at once rather than exiting and spending so much time with the game loading, and that the camera won’t adjust by flipping around at a change of possession which was disorienting. That was a big issue last year and was one of the first things I noticed when playing the mode in 09.

1220: Good news on roster sharing. You don’t have to be on a friends list to grab it. You can pull it from anyone just by typing in their gamertag/name. Just found this out!

1224: One thing that still irritates me is that after kicking off the play call screen defaults to special teams. Also saw one of the sideline catch animations when the player wasn’t close enough to the sideline to warrant it.

1229: Seen many more inaccurate throws than we saw back last month. There was one play I was rolling out with Jake Locker and missed the receiver by about 10 yards. Can’t speak much to the CPU throwing inaccurate passes yet, but from a user perspective it seems more frequent. I’d say that DE contain and QB Spy works better than in the past, though I haven’t really seen anyone who is an expert at exploting QB mobility.

1233: The clips I’ve uploaded still haven’t processed yet. I’m hoping to be able to link to them before I jump off.

1234: I believe with NCAA it is close to being final, there won’t be many changes made from this point on.

1238: For the short clips I’ve been able to get up check out my vimeo page. I think a couple have processed by now. It is just a RB animation, and then a big hit from three different perspectives.

1245: The game just seems to be more balanced than what I had previously played. Scores aren’t going out of control or anything. There is the potential for big plays, especially thanks to the player control, but I wouldn’t say it is easy to score. This has been with All-American difficulty setting.

1248: For the specific videos: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 I’ll try to get more later but likely won’t post them until late tonight.

1252: Head Coach live blog late this afternoon or evening. I’m going to play another game here so I can have more to discuss in the full write-up.