March Madness 08 Initial Impressions |
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Written by Craig Gonzalez
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Friday, 07 December 2007 |
 March Madness just arrived in the mail this morning and I got a quick game in as well as checked out a couple things in the game.
The first game I played was Michigan State vs. Michigan at the Breslin Center on All Conference difficulty, I was MSU. I ended up going down by a quick 8 points, but battled my way back to within 1 point going into halftime. In the second half the Spartans exploded and I opened up a nice lead and ended up winning by 13 points.
I will say that as the game went on and as I started to gain momentum, the crowd really got into the game. The chanting was awesome and the crowd does sync with the chants pretty good. The announce team does a decent job as well, even though I’m not a fan of Dicky V at all, I could tolerate him.
As far as the gameplay goes, it is a little bit improved from the demo version. When you bump it up one notch to the All-Conference setting, you can really tell the difference. You can’t really work the inside like you could in the demo and the overall defense is tighter. I also noticed that I wasn’t able to make 3’s at will, either. I think I only shot 22% from behind the arc. I also noticed that sometimes the defender you are controlling will sometimes go for the steal automatically which results in a foul sometimes. There’s a bunch of sliders you can adjust for various aspects of the game, but I really didn’t have the time to go into detail as far as what’s there. I am already late for work as it is. LOL
Honestly, I didn’t actually check to see if the game speed is bumped up a little from the demo because one of the first things I did was raise it up before I even played my first game. So, no matter what you thought of the game speed of the demo, you can adjust it to your liking. Another thing that I noticed, though, was that the head fakes still weren’t fixed from the demo. If my player received a pass and is standing there, if I fake the shot and the defender bits, there’s still almost a second pause where I couldn’t move my defender. I thought that was going to be fixed, but it doesn’t seem to be. That could be tied to a slider that could be adjusted, though. I’ll see if I can investigate that a little further.
Here’s a couple other quick things about the game…
All the audio volumes are at 100. I toned down the announcers a little bit because I felt they were too loud and got good results.
I noticed that the first time I tried to use UCLA at home just to see the court, the players were all wearing the super short shorts. I quit the game and started a new one and the shorts were back to the long ones.
Oregons courts looks pretty accurate, but “The Pit” font is a little small.
There’s no coaches roaming the sidelines.
Rebounding has improved.
Floor General is cool. It’s almost like 2K’s basketball where it shows you the play on the court, but you have to activate it with the R Stick.
Not really a halftime show, but they show the stats and show you the play of the half.
Now post game show at all. I don’t remember seeing any highlights whatsoever.
I still like the player info being in a separate window.
I had an Impact Moment after a foul and had my player interact with the cheerleaders, doing a little dance.
I think that’s about it as of right now. I will be at work all day, but I will try and get some impressions in a bit later today.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 07 December 2007 )
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