Dilemma: The HTTV proofs were delivered at the same time as the game.

First a confession: the last time I bought EA's college football game was 10 (the 2009 season) for PS2. I used to get it every year from the Woodson cover to the Desmond cover and play until it was taking more time than I could excuse because an exercise bike was involved. The exception was '05, which I played for four days before going back to 2004, still the gold standard of the series.

The versions I had were all great for power runs to set up bombs but in the summer of 2009 I was mostly interested in wrecking offensive rushing records with Rich Rod's offense. Like anybody with a touch of ASD, I cannot play until I've filled in and fiddled around with Michigan's rosters. Tate Forcier was like an 80 overall when I was done. Denard was probably set to move to cornerback—remember this was the 2009 offseason, when old men in conference hotels were dancing to Weapon of Choice:

Then I started playing and videogame Forcier would throw 8 interceptions per game because linebackers could leap 100 feet in the air. There was no such thing as an incomplete pass; you threw screens or you threw interceptions. It took just three games for my frustration to turn me off from the series and turn me into one of those people who delights in The Consumerist ripping on EA. Other than goofing around on my 2004 dynasty NCAA the game was dead to me.

Then they put Denard on the cover (and the wife let me get a PS3 once I proved how awesome it is at Netflix). And since I'd moved on from guy at convention hotels to guy who works for a college football blog, it turned out I could get an advance copy of the thing with Denard on the cover in return for telling people how I felt about it. A part of me finds it ridiculous that I can get away with this. Since I've been out of things for awhile (and Misopogal has grown skeptical over all this "work" I've been putting in) I'm gonna deliver the game to Ace after I post this, and next week you'll get a review from someone with a  frame of reference within the current console generation. Here's the things you should know now:

1. IT HAS DENARD ON THE COVER. Truly it is the most beautiful thing to grace a cover since...NCAA 06? NCAA 99? A baby swimming toward a dollar on the album where music got its balls back? If Denard was smiling maybe.

I adore all of you!

He is actually the most appropriate cover athlete for a version of this game since they put Ricky Williams on the one with unstoppable running backs because…

2. OPTION OFFENSE is awesome. They completely redid that and now read options work the way they're supposed to. EA also gave the defense its option-crushing corner blitzes and scrape exchanges.

I keep forgetting to sub Green in at FB

However the counter to the counter sucks. They put bubble and PA split end screens in the playbook, but the defense reads these way too quickly on any difficulty worth playing. Also I've found my skill position guys tire so fast that when I go to it I keep getting Jeremy Jackson. Anyway the option stuff is the most fun, specifically the read and triple options. Too bad Michigan went back to the future on offense since...

[after the jump]

3. FORGET ABOUT PASSING. Unless you turn interceptions off. Apparently the guy who was supposed to fix this since NCAA '08 is still in his office slamming his head against various objects (Nobody says anything because this is the same way he came up with the idea of John Madden as a franchise title). In '14 it's no longer because of middle linebackers from Krypton. Now it's super safeties and cornerbacks who stop animating and just slide 25 yards. The thing that gets me most often: all the routes are covered, I scramble around, the 2nd level comes up to stop me from a Terrelle Pryor-like scamper, and I try to sling it over their heads to the now-open guy—this always results in those guys intercepting it or at least knocking it down with an interception animation. Until I turned INTs down to 10 I was yet to have a game with more incompletions than interceptions. The thing that does work—quite consistently—is a four-verts seam to your slot or tight end that you lead inside. Of course they'd make the "Roundtree" route the only good one because as I remind you...

4. IT HAS DENARD ON THE COVER. Denard ROBINSON. Not that you really need him since…

5. DEFENSE IS PRETTY TERRIBLE. Especially when you play it, when your pass defense is completely theoretical, and you'll probably lose a few controllers to not ever being able to tackle in space even if you're controlling Jake Ryan and the computer is controlling my wife. It's weird that the controls are so responsive on offense then on certain modes you're almost locked out entirely.

The worst of this I've found is if you're controlling the running back on a screen play—you'll run into the OL and fall down and your QB will throw incomplete. This pretty much killed the Road to Glory mode (you'll note they've removed it from their marketing this year), which I tried with Green.

Anyhoo: defense. It sucks. Ace thought I was just way out of practice, but I think it's just more of a controls issue; I nearly just gave up on the game and thought about writing a rotten tomato review because I got so sick of getting torched by Purdue and am too proud to play on Freshman mode (at least you can set the difficulty differently for either side of the ball). Fortunately...

6. YOU CAN BE JUST THE OC AND SKIP THE OTHER PARTS. I did this.

And after getting past the bugginess (don't touch buttons while it's simming or you'll crash the game on PS3) it's not a terrible way to play. The problem is as bad as I was on defense, the computer is actually WORSE at this. Literally 80% of opponent drives are long touchdowns, usually consisting of 4 or 5 long plays. Apparently they can pass over the top, something you can never ever do. That's why I...

7. CREATED A CUSTOM PLAYBOOK. Gone are all the things that Borges loves, which is bombs and bombing and launching bombs and long bombs and Bob-Bombs and bomb bombidy bombadil bombs. In: the Pistol, specifically every option play in the Pistol, and every triple option play in the database so I can have my fullback back in the game. This is very important for...

8. EA FINALLY DISCOVERED PHYSICS. As in they remade the game engine so big running backs bounce off corners and if Jadaveon Clowney impacts a 5'7/160 scatback from Pahokee people start losing dreds. More importantly lineman blocking works like it does in physics, e.g. linebackers don't suddenly change direction in the middle of pursuit so they can lock arms with a tackle. On regular running plays a lot of times I get tackled by a falling defensive end who stumbled into my path after a good shove from the outside blocker—this is both refreshing and frustrating. I forgot what their special corporate name for this engine is—I'm sure they were really excited about it internally because they throw it at you a lot in the game, but fortunately this has not made an impression on my brain, which I have been instead filling with large running backs and fullbacks and fullbackian Jewish Iowa running backs and very large quarterbacks going head-first into defensive backs, which makes a crushing sound not unlike...

9. ANGRY IOWA RUNNING BACK HATING GOD. Who is not in this game. Neither are Penn State's sanctions, though PSU keeps getting slaughtered in sim games. But the single greatest oversight in re: reality sim is there's no playoff option. You can change conferences around every year, split them into divisions you name, and decide if there's to be November night games or non-Saturday football, protected rivalries (you pick them), and which conf champions get automatic BCS bids, but you can't get rid of the dag-nam BCS. You also can't change the number of conference games, which bugged me. They did have at least next year's scheduled non-conf games—that was a nice touch. I had some fun with conference realignment (click=largetation):

They don't give you enough character spaces to name a division "Schembechler"

I also tried starting a new franchise with Ohio State just to see if you can offer extra benefits to recruits—500 points for a Corvette, 250 points for a Lincoln. That part of the game is not in the game, but…

10. RECRUITING IS COMPLETELY REDONE. As with the latest versions (I'm told) it happens all year, which is kind of annoying I've found since you have to spend 20 minutes between games doing your crutin when you just want to get back to optioning fools. The big change is it's all points now instead of deploying your assistant's phone or trying to guess if this synthetic character wants to talk about how Ann Arbor is so darn close to Middlequidistantmezzocenterville, Ohio. The kids are upfront about what matters to them, and you'll get X amount of bonus points each week based on how well you fit that.

Crutin' also be hard. You have to identify just 35 guys you want at the beginning and then you end up in long battles of full-bore pressure against Oklahoma State for that one tight end. You're supposed to get an advantage in this as you…

11. LEVEL UP YOUR COACH LIKE A WARCRAFT CHARACTER. You get experience points for doing things and level up a tree. This was like half of the booklet they gave me for reviewing the thing but I was pretty underwhelmed by it—as an O.C. you just get to make your offense more cheap and as a head coach there's just too much good stuff you want—it might be better to just have these be static coach attributes. As it is it's just annoying that they made Michigan's D.C. a crappy dude who doesn't affect recruiting. I grew up on enough Final Fantasy titles to be a sucker for leveling but here it's just too much stuff and not enough thought put into it. Which can be said more about…

12. THE SINGLE MOST ANNOYING THING IN A VIDEOGAME EVER. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I believe videogames that cost over $50 on their own should refrain from trying to airline you as well. I also believe the sun and the moon are powerful gods and we should fear them. Maybe this is the way of the world now. But this disgusted me:

They hit you up with this at several junctures in a franchise: when you're trying to finish off your class, when you're trying to keep your underclassmen from bolting to the NFL or other schools, and here right before player training. You don't want digital Devin Gardner to leave, do you? With this limited time offer we can talk to fake Gardner for you—have your credit card handy. As far as I could tell it was $24 subscription to some sort of service that will update your game and a package of some of these things, but then they nickel and dime you on top of that if you want your offensive linemen to grow up big and strong (pro tip: they will anyway). I didn't investigate enough to figure out how deep the money pit goes. I'm all for this capitalism stuff—as good as feudalism has been for college football—but somebody tell me I'm not insane for thinking this is uber cynical, even for EA* and the NCAA. But then, like the league you should have lost all respect for, you still gotta go because…

13. IT'S A COLLEGE FOOTBALL GAME, which is just about the best thing you can sim and avoid a parental warning. I mean you could buy Madden instead but the Lions are going to be terrible this year and the nerds who keep modding Madden '08 on the computer have done a better job than EA of updating the title. Meanwhile, perhaps because they're going to have competition again soon, they've finally made a dramatic upgrade to the engine of this game. Like remember last year when the marketing was all "hey you get to put Desmond Howard on the Buckeyes—whaddaya think of that?" This year it's not a gimmick like "play a game of mascots" or "make Kevin Grady a Heisman"—the upgrades were in differentiating coaches from each other, making recruiting feel more like recruiting, and making the game play more like college football than a very advanced arcade. Plus…

14. IT'S GOT DENARD ON THE COVER. eeeeee. Anyway it's not without major flaws—some of which you can tweak with extreme sliders—but if you only care about dynasty mode, don't mind the BCS, and you're looking for a sim of the thrill you experienced watching Michigan's nascent 2009 offense shredding Michigan's 2009 defense, you're gonna fall for this in a big way.

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*Who very nicely gave us a free copy of this game.

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Thoughts on Rostering: Don't start your dynasty until you give Devin and Countess redshirts. Also the starting interior line is something like Bryant-Miller-Buryzinski and Joe Reynolds is the top receiver after Gallon while Darboh and Chesson were below Jackson (you'll want to fix all those guys). While you're at it upgrade Green and Toussaint (they made him terrible) and downgrade Rawls as you see fit. Teambuilder won't let you name a guy "Jake Butt" but I had no problem in the game. Players progress a good +5 or so per year in dynasty so don't go making Bosch a 78 or something. I had to create Tuley-Tillman and Houma, move Norfleet back to RB, and changed several dudes I figured I won't use (M-Rob, Ringer, Burzynski, Gunderson, Mike Jones) into Glasgow and important RS freshman linemen. Also the real moves: Morgan to MLB and Beyer to LOLB. Raymon Taylor is overrated, Countess severely underrated.

Tips/thoughts/asides/errata: Game is slow and a bit unstable on a 160GB PS3—maybe Xbox is smoother? Still really annoying that you can't double-up numbers in player editor—how long has this complaint been around? Future version ought to have an app to port recruiting to your phone so you can use your TV time for football. It also should develop practices—they tried this in previous versions but got it wrong and gave up; I think they just need to have you develop a package per game. I seem to spend a lot of the game watching cutscenes, even on fast mode. They are good cutscenes, except Devin likes to shoulder his teammates a lot.