NCAA Football 2K13

Ari Guttman, Staff Writer

NCAA Football 2K13has its ups and downs for this year’s sports fans. The game theme is “The Road    to Heisman” but it doesn’t make the cut compared to last year. The game gives out legacy stories. The Dynasty is the same as last year, but it’s different when recruiting players for a dynasty team.

In the Heisman Challenge there are quite a few blue chip players available, including Robert Griffin III, Barry Sanders, Doug Flutie, Herschel Walker, Desmond Howard, Charlie Ward, Marcus Allen, Andre Ware, Eddie George and Carson Plamer. There is also downloadable content to get players such as Archie Griffin, Tim Brown, Jim Plunkett, Tim Tebow, Mark Ingram and Matt Leinart. The Heisman Challenge provides various story lines for achievements with players, like scoring four touchdowns with that player. The game also has personal interviews with the players the gamer is controlling. For example, when playing as Robert Griffin III one goal is to “Gain more passing yards than Robert in a game.” Once the goal is accomplish, the game has a videotape of Robert Griffin III having an interview where he talks about a particular week of the season he played last year.

The dynasty is different when dealing in the scouting area. This year, the scouts get to choose one thing per week that is on their minds when talking to them on the phone. The player can ask how the fan base is or how the television studio is doing. It’s more interactive this year than last year because last year when on the phone talking to the players, it was the gamer who was always asking the questions. There was also a scoring system for points which ranged from boring the player to the player being excited when the gamer chose a certain topic to entertain them. This year that aspect has been eliminated. Thumbs up for that.

Where the game falls short is in the online area. International online multiplayer is still available, but where is the updated ESPN information for that day? For instance, people played NCAA 2K12 all day and all night, and still got real-time information for the day. Players didn’t have to turn off their consoles and turn on ESPN to find out what the score of a game was or for any of the latest news. This year the people that created this game did not include that, which makes it far less entertaining. People loved the latest updates that were streaming live. The only thing that is streaming live is the bar code that is flowing with information, but it’s more enjoyable to hear the live newscaster.

All in all, the game is generally unimpressive. The only things that returning players would find impressive are the Legacy story lines and scouting for players to play on their team. But where are the online updates for information from the newscasters? Did they take a break or just get lazy? That would be a good question to ask the game developers.