Monday, July 18, 2005

More on NCAA 2006

I posted a while earlier today that the game was, basically, brain dead. This is true even when you have maxed out the Awareness slider at the All-American level of difficulty. I also said that going to Heisman wouldn't improve anything. However, based on a game I just played on Heisman level, I should amend that (and now, I will).

My star receiver was "held" to 200 yards. More importantly, it looked like safeties were helping significantly more on deep routes instead of just leaving the cornerback out there to get roasted. So that's an improvement. It also wasn't an absolute money play on the deep ball when my impact receiver was "in the zone." Successful more often than it should have been, yes--but not a money play.

I couldn't call just one defense anymore. Yes, it only took three different ones to relatively control the offense, but that's a big, big improvement from one. It didn't look like the offense had more intelligent play selection, but execution seems to be better at the Heisman level. No improvement in calling running plays against pass defenses, unfortunately.

The problem on Heisman is going to be adjusting the sliders so that the running game can still be effective. The CPU players seem to be several steps quicker on this level, and there is an unbelievable difference in the effectiveness of the running game--that is to say, on All-American level (even with sliders maxed out), the running game can be devastating, but on Heisman level (even with sliders toned way down) run plays seem to get totally stuffed more often than not.

The kicking meters are also insanely fast on Heisman level, but I can live with that.

The biggest problem about Heisman level is that I can't imagine more than 10% of people being able to compete on this level of difficulty. So for everyone else, the game is brain dead. Fortunately, quite a few of you are in that 10%. I'm working on some Heisman sliders and I'll let you know how it goes.

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