This game is already really solid and the right tweaks could make it the best college football game ever in my opinion.

Take your pick, the punt return for a TD, the kickoff for a TD or the 79 yard TD run.

But I worry about a straight remake (with improved graphics). The FPS genre has come so far on the console that this could be a disaster, although I am sure there are a ton of gamers in the 25-35 range who will buy it regardless.

(via Digg)

In NCAA Football 11 you’re going to find shotgun runs to be more effective than they have ever been in any of our games. In college football shotgun running is a huge part of many teams high powered offense. You have to be able to mix it up, whether that means throwing in a Read Option, HB Sweep, Jet Sweep, HB Draw, Wild Cat, etc. That is where a lot of our focus has been for NCAA Football 11.

The running game in NCAA Football has been improving over the last few years. Long gone are the days where you couldn’t run up the middle and it was easy to bounce it outside or run the option for huge gains all the time. The only problem I have is that sometimes when they try to make a major impact on certain aspect of the game, they often go too far and create new problems. A few years ago (I think it was NCAA Football 06) they decided they were finally going to make it possible to return kicks/punts for touchdowns (this was practically impossible prior to this). The problem is that they went so far that I smashed the record for punt return touchdowns in a career (with like 15), but in one season. They have fixed this issue and now it’s probably back to not happening enough, but at least it’s not impossible.

IW has lost a lot of key people and it will be very interesting over the next 6-8 months to see what happens to the future of CoD.

The official NCAA 11 Blog has been updated with some new videos with the developers. There is no game footage but they talk about a bunch of new features. It all could be summarized in a blog post, but anything related to NCAA Football 11 is a good thing.

NCAA Football 11 Video Blog Series! : NCAA Football Blog : EA SPORTS.

The time frame is virtually identical to that last two Call of Duty games. Both Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were released in November with map packs coming in the March/April timeframe. Still, this feels like too long of a wait. Most people I know have already moved on to other games and with the supposed amazing list of games coming out this year, there is still competition. Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy XIII and God of War 3 have already stripped many people of their interest in MW2. The new Splinter Cell game is less than a month away and Red Dead Redemption and Alan Wake are both a month after that.

The $15 price tag, however, is not in line. Previous map packs have typically run around $10. Some would argue even that is too much, but at least it had become the norm. I am sure Infinity Ward would argue that previous map packs have included three maps (which amounts to $3.33 per map) versus this map pack which includes five maps ($3.00 per map) and therefore this is a deal. But two of the maps are COD4 maps. Since this game uses the game engine, it couldn’t have taken much to port them over. Also, map making isn’t terribly difficult. Fans can do it for the PC with third party tools and the internal people at IW can probably do it fairly quickly.

I tried to find some comparably priced DLC but the best I could find was $20 “expansions” for Grand Theft Auto IV. The difference was that these added 10 hours of gameplay (about 30% of the original game). The MW2 pack adds no single player or Special Ops (from what has been announced so far anyway) and costs 25% of the cost of the regular game.

I have logged a lot of time playing MW2 online, more than I am willing to admit here, or anywhere. I have more than got my money’s worth in terms of the original game. I suppose that one could argue that paying $15 to keep playing (which you basically have to do since you will be booted if you don’t have the current map) is not that big of a deal. But I have made the argument in the past that my issues with the game aren’t stale maps, it’s annoying/offensive players, cheaters and unsportsmanlike habits. New maps won’t fix that. I can take $15 and either buy a used game or put it towards a new game and get much more enjoyment than 5 extra maps will provide.

Probably like many people who bought 360s around that time, I got the “red ring of death (RROD)” less than a year after purchase. Microsoft was in so deep with bad PR by this time that they paid for shipping and sent me 30 free days of XBOX Live Gold. Since then I haven’t really had any problems. I am not what I would consider a heavy user. I don’t play everyday and can go weeks without picking it up (in fact in between my Call of Duty: World at War binge and the release of NCAA Football 10 I barely touched it for a month).

Over the last month, between the bachelor party and the wedding, the 360 was moved between the office and the living room a couple of times. I don’t know if this resulted in some unnecessary jostling but after returning to it’s home in the office, weird graphics issues began to surface. Color would get all crazy and the screen would flicker light crazy. If I unplugged the red component cable the flicker would go away but obviously the color is missing anything that comes through the red cable. My hope was that this was a bad cable. At times the video wouldn’t even come on when I turned on the XBOX (but I could hear the audio so I knew it was booting properly). I ordered a cheap replacement but it made no difference. At this point I succumbed to the fact that my XBOX was in a sense dead.

I was not exactly sure how I should react to this revelation. Part of my says that I got 3 years out of this piece of technology. While that does not seem like a lot (especially when you consider many people have SNES and N64s that still work), nowadays maybe it’s not that crazy. I have had computer hard drives that died after a couple of years and others than are still going strong 5+ years later. You hope that a video game console would at least outlive it’s desiredness. What I mean is, if my 360 died shortly after the XBOX 3 (whatever it will be called) came out, then I could live with that. But clearly I am frustrated after a mere 3 years.

My gut reaction was, screw Microsoft, I am getting a Playstation 3. And despite 4 game purchases in the last 6 months I was willing to make that sacrifice. Then I remembered a key fact, I owned the original Rock Band (and associated instruments). That was a near $200 investment that I just made 2 years ago (wow has it been that long?). I enjoy Rock Band (and the multiple Guitar Hero games we have), have paid for downloaded songs and just bought Beatles Rock Band. A rough estimate of how much we have spent on “rhythm” games is probably around $400 (which in retrospect is just insane). With that must invested, and me pretty sure that I would never buy any of these instruments again, I couldn’t give on the XBOX.

I originally planned to just buy an XBOX Arcade, since my assumption is that everything else on my existing XBOX works. But I got roped in to buying the Modern Warfare 2 special edition for $400. Basically for $200 more than the arcade, I got a 250 GB (!) hard drive, a copy of MW2 (which I was going to spend $60 on anyway) and 2 new black wireless controllers (which allowed me to return on we got for our wedding). It really only cost me $80 more out of pocket than I would have spent with the Arcade and I think a 250 GB hard drive and slick looking XBOX were worth it.

I remember playing online way back in high school. We used to dial-up to this one guy and play Command and Conquer. We didn’t do it many times but it was pretty fun to play against someone online. My friend and I would team up and strategize and see if we could outwit the other guy. I never did any online gaming after that until college.

My freshman year roomate was hugely into Counterstrike. I knew what Half-Life was but had never heard of Counterstrike. So he got me into trying it and I was hooked. We played on the LAN and even setup a server. There were always people on (it was engineering school!) so you could always get a game. Before long we were having LAN parties and even clans for each floor! (We were DK7, Dark Knights of 7). I know of at least 1 person who dropped out exclusively because of CS. After that got old, I played some Diablo 2 and that was pretty much the only game I played online until post-college.

After I got out of college and had a job, I got bored and so my friend (the same one who got me into CS) and decided to start playing Battlefield 2. We were into for a while but had trouble finding times to play together so it didn’t last all that long. Fast forward a few years to playing Call of Duty.

It was a pretty fun 6 weeks. I wasn’t playing everyday, but almost and I put some serious hours in on the weekends. It was totally fun and for a while I could see how fun an addicting it was. But once you make it to level 65 (the highest level initially) and go to Prestige Level 1 (basically starting back over from level 1) the novelty starts to wear off. I certainly had improved, but I don’t think that I can get a whole lot better without logging even more time playing. And that just isn’t worth it. Add to it the wanks online and it gets tiring.

There are silver linings though. I had a lot of fun playing with friends and I would love playing with friends anytime. If I had enough peeps I would try to get some private games together. I already have a spot in an Online dynasty for NCAA Football 2010. I would love to play some co-op HAWX or even co-op CoD:WaW. I think in moderation online gaming could be fun. If nothing else CoD got me to buy an XBOX live membership, so I no longer have any excuses.