If there is one thing to know about me, I like sports video games on most consoles. That includes the Super Nintendo, even though most of them (not including Tecmo) are massively below average. NCAA Football is a game that the producers from Mindscape that I try to believe wanted to at least be as decent as Bill Walsh College Football for the SNES. However.. as you'll read.. it doesn't really come close. There are some positives, so let's dive into those first.
Positives:
1. Field graphics: These are quite done well in my opinion. They aren't choppy, they aren't plastered on there at all and they look pretty decent for an SNES game made by a company most haven't heard of today. So this is a pretty solid starting point.
2. Offense/defense mix: The offenses aren't too overpowering (see Tecmo) and defenses aren't world-beaters (See Madden on SNES) so they both have a good flow to them on both sides of the ball. This was a good point for me while playing it.
3. Team uniforms: I believe for the most part, Mindscape got those right. Wisconsin's colors were good, same with Stanford, Syracuse, and so on. Not an overtly great positive, but one that'll work when you at least are knowledgeable about the sport of football.
4. NCAA license: Not sure how the NCAA licensed this game but not Bill Walsh. Sort of mystified, but at least they got colleges instead of random city names.
Negatives:
1. No regular season: Yep, like I said it doesn't get much better than the four listed above. The way to beat this game is go through a 16 team tournament and you are good. No regular season like actual college football You can do just one of the decades because otherwise it's just repeating itself through decades.
2. Slow pace: The time is slow, the players are slow and the running/passing are slow. In all, this is just a slow game. I'll emphasize that it isn't blocky. It's just slow. While most games are only around 30 minutes, you also burn a lot of time in the playbook, which leads me to..
3. Playbook clunk: This is very clunky. And also slow as well, because it takes forever to get to the play you want and you risk a delay of game penalty a lot of the time. If Mindscape and refined this, it would have been a lot better. However, it's very difficult to navigate within a 25 second frame for a play.
4. Passing game: This is a major downfall. It's difficult to complete passes. It is something in the mechanics of the game that make it a rough thing to come up with as an answer because it would be a more polished game with a better passing game. A real shame considering the passing game is so brutal and it is hard to complete passes. A product of that is...
5. Controls: Yep, the first time I will complain about the controls of a game. These were just so nonsensical it is hilarious. The controls to kick are so wonky, same with toggling for a receiver and passing. For rushing and defense it is easy to do. But otherwise, it's a mess of the controls all around.
6. Map on the field: Now you can toggle the map off, but it brings up a point. Why is there a map anyway when you can turn it off? It doesn't make much sense to me at all.
Analysis:
There weren't many college games made for the SNES, but Bill Walsh is better by far than this game. There were a couple more games made but I haven't played them at all. NCAA Football had some good moments to it, but there were far too many negatives for it to be considered even an average game at best.
Grade, Where does it rank all-time?
The grade is somewhere around a 4 out of 10. Mindscape did the fundamentals of offense/defense right. They also had the NCAA license to build themselves upon, but they fell well short. If they cleaned up the game's clunky features, slow gameplay and made it close to a Tecmo-esque game, they would have been so much better than Bill Walsh's College Football. However, they had a game that was far too slow, too clunky, and too uncontrollable. For a rank, I have to put it around 540th, or there about. It's not the worst of the worst, and it's far from the worst sports game. However it's not a good game either and doesn't deserve to be in the top half.
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