Played a great game of NCAA today...

[mercalnd]

Quote: Originally Posted by Radja

i prefer 2k hockey & basketball, but in these posts i am talking sports games in general. i was able to get a set, with the help of sportsforever, that worked with nfl 2k5 for me and rspencer tweaked it even more. but nfl 2k5 is a perfect example of my post. it required gobs of slider adjustments. it took me and him almost a year to get it right. i didnt play it much at first because of the issues you mentioned but i decided to give it one more chance before football season last year and it worked. BUT AGAIN, it took forever for both me, sportsforever and rspencer. in general, it seems to me the football games the past few years have digressed in fun level below the other sports titles. i played far more college hoops and mlb 2006 and winning eleven individually than all the football games combined. i think i learned my lesson with baseball last year. i spent a month with mlb 2k5 only to be completely frustrated. i finally bought mlb 2006 and discovered with minimal adjustments it was a far better game. i recently tried mvp 2005 and that game plays well. had i bought either before 2k5, i would have saved myself a month of frustration. all you have to do is surf the forums to see that the all hoops games need tweaking, while some feel both hockey games were unplayable and all the football have glaring faults, some more than others, that drive a section of people away. are we too picky? are the games too complicated for their own good? where is the happy medium? just a few years back, we put up with more things. we just played the games we bought. you dealt with stuff that you couldnt fix. now, we sometimes nitpick the littlest thing until that is all we can see. winning eleven is the only game that i play that is playable out of the box. everything else can be frustrating at first. i wish that developers would follow their example.

I think it's not that the games are getting too complicated but rather that they're getting ever closer to reality. Before we didn't tweak and complain as much because as was mentionned there were no sliders and it was harder to identify specific flaws cause the games overall weren't as close to the real thing as they are today. When the product is so close to the real thing, the little things stand out more.

Also, the irony is that I think with the years the games have actually taught us more about the sports themselves. For example, you mentionned all hoops games need tweaking yet I play CH 2K6 on default All-Conference and find it just right but I'm not a basketball expert. I only watch the occasional game and the NCAA tourney. I don't know how old you are, how long you have been playing how much you follow these sports, if you've ever played them in real life, etc. but it truly seems that knowing more about the sports make us notice little things more. It is true that ignorance is bliss.

As far as football games are concerned and your mention that they seem to have digressed in fun level over the past few years, I have noticed that too. I think they peaked in AI with the 2004 games. CPU AI since then has taken a turn for the worse in all 3 major series. 2K5's CPU QB AI was a disaster, NCAA 2005 was worse and Madden 06 has incompetent QB AI as well. NCAA 06 is pretty bad out of the box as well. IMO, they're trying to push the envelope, as they should and are running into unexpected side effects. All three series suffer from this problem. Without sliders, none of these game would have been playable to people that are actual fans of the sport.

On the other hand, sliders give us the impression that we can find just the right combination to produce a "perfect" balance and some of us end up tweaking to no end instead of enjoing the games. The biggest issue there I think is that we start tweaking right away, before we get good at the game. That might be why you were able to find that set of sliders for 2K5 that fits you so well after a year. By then, your skill level had leveled off.

[mercalnd]

Quote: Originally Posted by rudyjuly2

What disappoints me though is that a lot of these games are great but going to the new gen systems will take 2 or 3 years just to get the gameplay fixed again. Remember how bad NBA Live was the first few years on the PS2 after being so good on the PS1? Oh well, sometimes its nice to think about the past but the current games are really good.

Quite true. New engines will need a few years of tweaking to find proper balance, which is quite normal. EA pretty much fell flat on its face with its new engines on all their games, partly because the final 360 dev kit came in so late. They also had quite a ways to go with the lack of major improvements on the PS2/XBOX generation over the systems' lifespan. 2K may have scored a good blow cause I hear their games are ports with revamped graphics and have had much fewer issues.

Personally, I think I will stick with my XBOX for another year or 2. The games I have now (NCAA 06, NFL 2K4, NHL 2K6, WE9, Rugby 06 and CH2K6) are all very good and it's hard to "wear out" titles when you play that many different games.

BTW, another try of Playmakers' sliders for NCAA 06 has brought back my love for this game after playing with Jistics' sliders for so long.