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NCAA GameBreaker 2001 Review
Jon Lenaway
00/12/0000
Can You Coach Foot Speed?
Letās get one thing straight, college football always has been and always will be better than pro football. You get all of the heated rivalries, historic traditions, and fast-paced action of football without the over-paid ninnies whining about making $6 million instead of $8 million (boo hoo). Unfortunately, each year it seems the college videogames are afterthoughts by throwing college uniforms and stadiums on the NFL engine. Who are you to listen to me, though (an under-paid ninny whining about videogames)?
If youāve played previous versions of Game Breaker or GameDay, you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect in Game Breaker 2001. Passing and running havenāt changed much at all, and most of this yearās updates seem to be to the team stats and character animations. Game Breaker seems to be waiting until its PlayStation2 debut to show us some truly new features. That said, the game play in this version is still solid.
Iām not an expert on sports games, nor do I normally consider myself very good at them (Whatās the phrase? I suck), but Iāve found that blocking punts on the easy and normal difficulty levels is entirely too easy. I have a 100% blocked punt percentage, and that is no exaggeration. Wait until the computer hikes the ball on 4th down to punt, choose to control the guy closest to the kicker, run at the kicker and hit the dive buttonā¦blocked. On the hardest difficulty, however, this goes away and the blocks become harder.
This yearās edition of Game Breaker doesnāt look a whole lot different than the previous version. Each collegeās stadium is accurately represented within the bounds of the PlayStationās hardware limitations. Players are still polygonal, and make use of quite a few different animations for tackles, moves, and celebration. While the game moves well most of the time, there are times (during kickoffs mostly) where the frame rate noticeably drops.
As a former member of the University of Michigan Marching Band, I found that this game commits a major sin. After the Wolverines score a touchdown, they play the incorrect fight song for the school! This might be a little thing to the rest of you, but this drives me crazy especially since āThe Victorsā can be heard at times during selection screens. The correct song is lurking in the game, but isnāt played during the Michigan games.
Personal issues aside, the rest of the sound needs a lot of work as well. While Keith Jackson is arguably the best broadcaster in college football, the clips used in the game do not really add a whole lot. Too many times, you hear Keith repeat himself with the same catch phrases in the same game. A deeper library of sounds would have alleviated this problem a bit, because I get extremely tired of hearing āYou canāt coach foot speedā, or about how my DB reminds him of a sycamore.
While it is entirely possible to buy and enjoy this game quite a bit, it just does not seem like a title you would want to run out and buy if you already have last yearās game. With only a little over a month before the PlayStation2 hits stores here, it might be just as well to wait and see how well the series makes the jump up to the new platform before diving into this version.
