Customer Reviews

NCAA March Madness 2004

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Overall, this game is a huge improvement from last year's version. The game play is alot smoother, graphics are very clean and the new arenas are great!! Having said that there are some complaints that I have. I'm not sure if this is true for other schools, but I've been playing as Kentucky and their entire freshman class is missing from the game. The create-a-player or player editor is a pain because you have to exit after you save changes for a single player, so to name 12 guys on your team takes about 30 mins. The crowd chants are really cool and school specific and I like the idea that not every game is a sellout, but teams like the Dukes and UKs draw huge road crowds even if the team is ranked low. Basically, low ranking for either team involved means very small crowd for the game. The commentary is pretty smooth, but the sound quality can be scratchy sometimes. I like the dynasty mode, it's modeled after the football game, but the rankings are a little out of wack. If don't play the Maui Invitational, your team is dropped way out of the rankings just because a team like Iowa State is 8-0 and you haven't played yet. The scheduling another problem. You have to send out letters to schools to ask to play them, a really cool idea, but disappointing when the computer wouldn't let me play Louisville, my archrival. Overall, the game is fun to play and is much more of a sim than last year. There is still some room to grow, though.

First the good. The gameplay for this game is just great. Although not as clean-running as NBA Live of the same year, it is a super game that captures the feeling of playing the college game. You can play any team, and the feeling is the same. Just a lot of fun to play. Good quickplay, and good coaching options too to tailor the games the way you want to play. Good customization.

Now the bad.
1) Load times are long. Not terribly so, but just enough to aggrivate you every time. Just a little longer than needs be.
2)Edit player. You have to exit out of the entire menu. To do every player would take more time than I have, or most humans have. I bought a memory card to have the names. Granted, EA cannot use the college names, but don't make it so hard to put them in!!!!
3) Coaching contracts are a joke. I made the final 4 three years in a row, and was fired. Turn them off, is my advice, then you can play as long as you want. If you are fired, you have to find another team to play with. I would prefer to keep my one college going, so that option should have been included.
4)Simulating games. Incredibly tedious. Get some speed!!!!!

Final analysis: Buy used, if you can. Hope to see improvement next year. I will use this for draft classes, but for basketball gameplay I use NBA LIve

Let me start with the positive: The gameplay is pretty good, which makes up for a lot. However, the problems are overwhelming. A list:

1) Like in NCAA Football, you get to pick your favorite team the first time you start up the game. Unlike NCAA Football, there is no way to save this setting, so the screen asking you to pick your favorite team pops up EVERY time you enter the game.

2) There is no auto-saving or auto-loading, so every time you enter the game, you have to load your settings, your user profile and your dynasty. And instead of asking you after every game you play if you would like to save everything, you have to go through and do it separately. Save user profile, save dynasty, save settings...it gets tedious.

3) Typing in names is nuts. Every time you type in a player's name and save it, it takes you all the way back out to the main roster menu and you have to start again. Click edit rosters, scroll through the hundreds of teams to find yours, then scroll through the players to get the one you want to edit. Just doing the 11 or 12 players on your team is frustrating.

4) You can't use this year's actual schedule. You either have to choose your out-of-conference opponents (and hope they will accept your challenge) or have your out-of-conference opponents randomly selected for you. Then the dates of the games are randomly selected, so even if you get all the teams on your team's schedule this season to accept your challenges, the order in which you play those games will be nothing like the actual order that your team played them.

5) When you put the ball out of bounds, the little EA Sports logo swipes across the screen to cut to the throw-in, and the opposing team throws it in way to fast, sometimes even before the EA logo is finished swiping. This means no time to set up your defense to try to steal the ball on the in-bounds pass. This is extremely frustrating when you are down by 4-8 points in the last couple minutes.

6) The biggest problem of them all. One of those HOW DO YOU MAKE THAT ERROR type mistakes... They set it up so the conference standings are set by teams' overall records instead of in-conference records. Absolutely ridiculous. When I saw this after playing one season on Dynasty mode, I wanted to throw the CD in the garbage. Unbelievable.

Honestly, the game play is great. Far better than 989's Final Four 2003, which I bought last year and was disappointed by. But it's like no one tested the menu functions or save functions or roster functions...and most of all, it seems like no one who knew thing one about college basketball even gave the game so much as a once-over before it was shipped. It's just not what you would expect from EA.

PLEASE EA, FIX THIS FOR NEXT YEAR!!!

I don't know what took so long for EA to produce an NCAA basketball game with a dynasty mode...but this game is pretty well worth the wait. It's basically identical to the NCAA football game as far as the dynasty mode stuff goes (recruiting, program prestige, etc), and a lot like NBA Live in the gameplay department. However, I enjoyed this game much more than its NBA counterpart for a couple of reasons. First, the college game is more about running half-court sets and back-cuts, rather than just having a shooter trying to create space on his own (like the NBA), and this game reflects that. Also, the franchise mode on NBA Live is kinda complicated, and it's difficult to keep a team together with the salary cap structure the way it is. Obviously, the NCAA game has none of those restraints. To keep a good program going, simply try to put together a better and better team, and keep trying to get good recruits to come to your school.
To sum up, I was very disappointed in the total lack of effort on EA's part to put a college b-ball game out...even though they did try with that March Madness game with Shane Battier on the cover (that game was disgraceful). But this game just about completely makes up for it. It has some annoying properties (load times are devastatingly slow, hearing your school's fight song 75000 times while you're simming to game gets old), but the gameplay and the dynasty mode are well worth it. The freestyle control is a nice addition, and seems to have more worth on defense than NBA Live. Also, anyone on your team with a high passing rating will make some pretty nice passes, especially in transition. I know that may not sound like a big deal, but again, passing is a bigger part of the college game, and the attention that was paid to it in this game is a big improvement.

EA Sports....brings to life the college basketball tradition that is so much enjoyed year after year. Once you tipoff, you'll appreciate the college atmosphere that is masterfully captured in this action-packed game. The rowdy student sections will raise the intensity level throughout the game, especially when the game comes down to the wire. School specific strategies add a nice touch of realism during gameplay, zone/man-to-man/or show your teams conditioning with a killer full court press. Amusing touch of witty and down-right funny quirks are exchanged throughout the game, in addition to solid commentating from the dynamic duo of Vitale and Nessler. And with the ability to totally customize your teams schedule of opponents (with the exception of conference games), it puts you in total control of your dynasty's destiny. And seaching for up and coming new talent is crucial to any program...so test out your recruiting skills, and try to land that prized blue chipper that may lead your team into the Big Dance, and secure your place in history. You will enjoy the gameplay, graphics, and good-old fashioned fun with this high-flyin', fast-breakin', crowd pleasin' game. So lace 'em up tight and take your team to the national spotlight that we know as...March Madness.

This game is the real deal. It's a must have for college basketball fans. It's graphics are great and I like that you can do a season, create a team, and much more. You can also play a mascot game or make a school into a national powerhouse. You can also create and edit players, and pick from all 326 teams. This game is great.

This is a great game. This time you can be the coach of your favorite college. Also if you edit the players name, it will show it on the back of their jerseys. Dynasty mode is great but recruiting and other off-season tasks are slow. This time you can export a draft class to NBA Live 2004. The controls are the same as they are on NBA Live. The only thing I didn't like about this game is when you edit a person and get done the game takes you back to edit player and you have to find the team and the next person again. Dynasty mode is the best because you can be the coach for your favorite college. I am in my second year with North Carolina and my team won the national title my first year. Our overall record was 36-2. A fun game if you have nothing else to do. It is a great game but NBA Live 2004 is a little better.

What could have been one of this generation of consoles greatest sports titles, is perhaps nothing more than one of the most frustrating games of all times. The gameplay and the player graphics are pretty good but the attention to detail present in NCAA Football is nowhere to be found. Genric schedules, generic stadiums, generic and incomplete rosers. The menus and their load times are pathetic. There are no automatic saves for Dynasty and User Profile. The favorite team feature has to be set each time you power up. The list goes on and on. I played this game for three days before I traded it on Madden 2004. Maybe next year EA.

This game without a doubt is one of the best basketball games I have ever played. Usually I don't like basketball but I tried the college one and it was the best basketball game around. The only thing frustrating about this game is that in the start of the game when you have to pick a team I tried to pick a high ranked school (Duke) and they sucked! But anyways I would really recomend that you buy this game, first rent it and see if you like it and then if you do then buy it!

To be perfectly honest, I have never been more disappointed in an EA sports game. After College Football, I had high expectations for this game, but they were not met.

The game allows you to choose your favorite school, just as College Football did. The only problem is that this never gets saved, so you have to choose it every time you start the game. Dynasties and User Profiles are not automatically loaded, you must manually load each. Switching between menus takes about 5 seconds, you would think the game has frozen. There are countless annoying errors spread throughout the game that I continue to notice as I go along. Charleston Southern was placed in the WAC, conference standings are sorted by overall record (not conference record), scheduling is absurd (you are sometimes scheduled to play 3 days in a row), and the rankings are extremely volatile (one game you're #1, next week you're #10 and you haven't lost a game).

Game play is actually great, but the rest of the game really drags down the quality of the product. The only complaint I have about gameplayis that offensive rebounding is nonexistent.