This weekend didn’t involve as much video gaming as we had anticipated. Other things happened, like going outdoors and actually breathing fresh air! We rode the four-wheelers a bunch, watched some college football (my Buckeyes are reeling, but I’m not dismayed) and played some NCAA 2005 on the Gamecube.
Watching a few football games this weekend made me realize how far football games have come but also how much farther they can still go. While it is unrealistic to think a gamer would want to spend 3 hours playing a game of football (3 hours being the average length of a college or pro football game) I think there can still be more realistic additions to both the graphics and AI. For one, collision detection still has a while before it’s perfect. Body parts still go through other bodies as if they were ghosts, collisions occur and bodies contort in unrealistic (in a Newtonian Physics sense) manners, I could go on. There also should be in place ways to play other positions. My brother-in-law doesn’t really like to play offense, so when we play co op, he plays one of the down linemen. He thinks holding ‘X’ keeps his guy engaged, but I’m not sure about that. If there was a way to make a sort of “mini game” to determine the amount of success one has, would be an improvement. I really like the 1st person mode in ESPN 2k5 (even though I’m not good at it) but that would only work for one person.
With respect to the AI, it is getting better but the play calling can be very predictable and sometimes blatantly wrong. I’ve had the computer driving on me at the end of the first half (in NCAA 2005) and it lets the clock roll until there is less than five seconds on the play clock before it hikes the ball. In the process, it loses precious seconds to set up the next play or get ready to kick a field goal.
But as I said, football games have come a long way. I’ll be going over my top 5 football video games on Friday. Hopefully this will start a trend of posting top 5 lists every once and a while.