NCAA ’09 music to fans' ears

• By RICH LOUP
• 2theadvocate.com sports editor
• Published: Jul 18, 2008 - UPDATED: 6:45 p.m.

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One of the annual signs that football season is getting closer is the release of EA Sports' "NCAA Football".

The '09 version (the NCAA Football titles are numbered the way new cars are designated) hit the stores July 15 with an emphasis on improving the gameday stadium atmosphere.

For the most part, EA succeeded in bringing a different feel, especially on the audio side.

There are a few other new features that might grab your attention.

Outside of that, NCAA ’09 brings the same solid features that allow avid sports gamers to start football season in the summertime.

The best new feature is Custom Stadium Sounds. With this in play, you can take your favorite music on your console and program it to play at particular moments of the game (touchdowns, fourth downs, kickoff, etc.).

Keeping the music football-specific, an LSU fan might be inclined to play the “Geaux Tigers” cheer after a Tiger first down, the “Chinese Bandits” piece after a defensive stop on third and fourth downs, and “Tiger Rag” after a touchdown. Or you can be creative and come up with your own music for certain scenarios (one of my tweaks is the old Astrodome scoreboard home run explosion for touchdowns).

The one downside to the Custom Stadium Sounds feature is that you have to create a playlist on your console for each song you want to utilize in the game. The Custom Stadium Sounds always plays the first song in any playlist, and with the play clock running, you don't have five minutes to wait for the next tune in a multi-song group.

Staying with the theme of atmospheres and stadiums, the fields appeared to be a bit more detailed in NCAA ’09. The one fault with that is that there's not much in the way of field deterioration during the game. The lack of worsening fields also was a flaw in NCAA 08.

To make matters slightly worse, an NCAA ’08 strength disappeared for ’09. The skies would gradually change in ’08, turning the sunlight of a 3:30 kickoff into black skies by the time the game would end.

What would have been ideal for NCAA ’09 would have been to combine the NCAA ’08 skies with the Madden ’08 deteriorating fields. Alas, the skies went the way of Madden -- pretty, but constant.

Game play is still fluid in NCAA ’09, keeping an edge it held on Madden last year. The dynasty mode is still pretty addictive. "Quick recruiting" has been added in case you want to shorten the amount of real time you spend trying to lure cyber football players to your campus. The online community now has the ability to play an online dynasty. If you're an online gamer, you can download rosters from other community members in their EA lockers.

The Legend mode is still pretty solid after a good showing last year. The Mini Games are also OK if you're short on time, with two new additions in the fold for NCAA ’09.