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All the gameplay and all the technical issues aside, I want to take some time out to tell you guys about some of the cool things I saw yesterday. For one, the head tracking on the game is neat. Not only do the WR’s track the ball with their heads, but while we were watching a replay on a running play, we saw a DE caught up in a block and actually track the ball carrier with his head as the ball carrier ran by him. Now, it could’ve very well been in the game last year, but I didn’t notice. I saw some really cool one-handed grabs near the sideline and the back of the end zone. I didn’t consider it cheesy or overdone because they were well within the context of the play and really, it only happened maybe two or three times in the 5 or so games that I played. I took a pic of one that’s on the site now where the Auburn QR made a slick one-hander near the goaline but also near the sideline. He made a conscious effort to keep on foot in bounds, while making the grab as well. Naturally, I was a little distraught since it was done against me in the tournament, but we stopped the game right there so I could take a pic, it was that nice. In all of the games that I played, there was only one blocked extra point and the other times weren’t even close. I also noticed the goaline, 3rd and 4th and inches defense is stingier. I had a 3rd and inches and the DL did a nice job of crashing my blockers, but I was still able to lunge for the first down…. barely. Which leads me to say I notice hardly any Mario running, if any. Injury scenes are all right, I guess. They show the guy lying on the field and tell you what’s wrong. I didn’t really see too much in the way of variety of injuries or injury times, though. It seemed that a lot of players were only out for a few plays for “rehab”. Another thing I noticed was the wobble on the ball while it’s in the air during punts and some throws, it’s not a tight spiral every time. And one last thing, the playbooks are bigger and have more plays. Exactly how much bigger, I’m not sure, but I saw a bunch of plays in there that weren’t in last year’s game.
Speaking of the playbook, new to this years game are automatic motion routes. Basically, the motion is built into the play, so what you have to do is hit the “A” button to send the player in motion and then when he gets where he needs to be, the ball snaps automatically. Of course, we found that out the hard way by hitting “A” and then hitting “A” again, only to have the QB immediately throw the ball. You can tell which plays have the auto motion because they are highlighted with a green overlay. One thing that I noticed about those auto motion plays is that the QB takes the clock into consideration before snapping the ball. One time, I didn’t realize I called a play with the auto motion and the play clock was running down under 5 seconds when the guy went in motion, but the center snapped the ball before the play clock ran out. It was a nice touch and a nice way to avoid a delay of game penalty.
I know I’ve gone on about the good things that I’ve seen, so let me tell you about few things that I saw that I didn’t quite like. I did notice a lot of screen clipping between players in between plays. You would see guys ghost right through each other when getting up off the ground. I don’t know if it was the build we were playing or if that’s just how it’s going to be, but I did also notice a little bit on the facemasks as well. It’s like there was a different color underneath the “paint job” or something that wanted to rip through and it was very apparent during the close-ups. I also noticed that the load times while viewing and scrolling through the depth charts was still a little long. I was hoping that they were going to smooth that out, but again, it could’ve been the build, I don’t know. I played Moostache most of the day and the very first system we played on took a dump right when the first game started, which is why I took a picture of the debug screen in our gallery. So I don’t know it the systems had anything to do with some aspects of the game and what not. Anyway, I’m still not sure how accurate the Pass Interference is going to be. I didn’t see too many PI calls, but the one that was called on me was so inappropriate and totally wrong. Viewing the replay, it was quite apparent that my player never touched the WR, yet he still got called. Meanwhile, I saw a couple fairly obvious calls that were missed that resulted in some INT’s.
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