First NCAA Basketball 09 Screens and Blog

by pastapadre
Posted October 11th, 2008 at 9:21 am

Operation Sports has received the first screenshots and producer blog for NCAA Basketball 09. You can check out the screens here and the blog here. The producer blog details the use of the NBA Live engine and how they’ve improved upon it and made it unique for the college game.

As a production team, we all knew that we had to continue to invest in creating an authentic college basketball experience. We needed to continue to capture everything that is unique about college basketball – from the mascots and cheerleaders to the amazingly unique venues to the student sections and fight songs. Also, and probably more importantly, we had to recreate the differences in gameplay that you see between NCAA and NBA.

Just as the teaser trailer did the screens remind me a lot of NBA Live 09 which shouldn’t be a surprise given the shared engine. One of the specific improvements mentioned is how the gather has been removed from the shot block animations. Given that delay in response is one of the biggest complaints about Live it seems likely to be included in an upcoming patch. In fact probably more than a few of the improvements made to NCAA Basketball will be added to Live so this offers some good insight into that even if you aren’t all that interested in NCAA.

Tags:

Josh

[quote comment="41681"][quote comment="41670"]I know Pasta is trying his best, and I sometimes get pissed for the wrong reasons.

Just frustrating with the types of problems we are seeing from these “nextgen” games when last gen seemed to have most the kinks worked out.

Whether games are being released incomplete, or with major glitches and bugs, or with major online issues, it just seems to be one thing after another lately.

I like patches as much as anyone to correct gameplay issues, but some of these things never should have been in the retail copy to begin with.

Just frustrating. . .[/quote]

I understand your frustration, but I don’t really think things are different now than they were then. It was just that people accepted things more, as games progressed and the technology improved people became more demanding of them. I guarantee the games you played 10 years ago had as many damaging problems if not more than we have now. It was just you had to live with them because no fix was coming.

Now that is not an excuse to have non-functioning features around release time. I’ve written harsh articles on EA numerous times for that (Tiger Game face, NCAA online dynasties, NCAA online performance, Madden online performance) and 2K (MLB 2K8 online performance), and SCEA (The Show online performance).

It’s one thing to have aspects of a game people don’t like or glitches, every game will. But when you advertise a feature and don’t deliver you deserve to hear from the community about it, unfortunately the media doesn’t seem to care. They review a game, don’t even test online play as we see time and time again, and move on to promoting the next game to come out. Until they make these companies be accountable there is no end to this in sight.[/quote]

Yes companys should hear from the community when they advertise a feature & don’t deliver, but just because the online play of the game isn’t as smooth as offline play doesn’t mean reviewers should give the game a significantly lower score. A game can still be good without online play. People shouldn’t expect so much out of online play in my opinion.
Josh

[quote comment="41690"]NCAA Basketall 09 = Weak Sauce…[/quote]

That’s funny..I thought I was the only person who said “Weak Sauce”. Lol
Josh

[quote comment="41690"]NCAA Basketall 09 = Weak Sauce…[/quote]

That’s funny..I thought I was the only person who said “Weak Sauce”. Lol
tramacity

wack!!!!
tramacity

wack!!!!