Peter Schrager
FOXSports.com, Updated 2 days ago
During our freshman year of college, my buddy Noah and I would always go to this random barber shop off campus to get our hair cut by an older woman named Rose. Rose was cool. A woman in her 60s, she smoked cigarettes, told war stories from the '70s, and gave a mean buzzcut for $5. We were loyal to Rose, and by the end of the spring semester, she was cutting our hair for free.
When we returned to campus after summer recess the next fall, Noah and I trekked over to the barber shop to discover that Rose was no longer employed there. No, she'd taken a job at the children's barber shop around the corner. Without a second thought, the two of us just nodded our heads, turned around, and followed Rose to her new digs. And for the next three years of our college careers, Noah and I got our buzzcuts in specialized seats shaped like airplanes, boats, trains, fire engines, and sportscars. Barney and Raffi were almost always on in the background.
That feeling of being a grown man sitting in a barber's chair shaped like an airplane? That's kind of how I'll feel Tuesday afternoon when I make my annual trip to the video game store to pick up "NCAA Football '08." Like clockwork, every summer — despite being in my twenties, I find myself on a random weekday in July, at a GameStop or an Electronic Boutique, milling around amongst a sea of pimple-faced teenagers giddy to purchase a video game the very first day it's out. Since the days of "Bill Walsh College Football" on Sega Genesis back in the early '90s, I've been an unabashed loyalist to the Electronic Arts sports franchise.
Last fall, I battled the computer simulated results of nearly every big college game on "NCAA Football '07" in a weekly Friday column. Sure enough, the game predicted more correct outcomes than both the readers and me.
While others go gaga over "Halo" and the millions of other crazy shoot 'em ups on the market, "NCAA Football" is one of the only video games I can still actually grasp and play.
Of course, I'm not the only twenty-something with a sense of attachment to the franchise. According to Kendall Boyd, "NCAA Football '08" product manager for Electronic Arts, "While we have a lot of teenagers playing the game, our biggest demo is grown men out of college. 25-year-old is our average fan, which really makes sense as you think about folks who just graduated college and still are gaming."
And while "Madden," Electronic Arts' other football franchise, seems to get all the hype when it comes out each year in August — "NCAA Football '08" has its cult of die-hard fans too.
Boyd explains, "We've had so many passionate gamers out there do some pretty crazy things for "NCAA Football." We've seen kids eat sticks of butter as well as get permanent tattoos just to get a copy. Our fans will line up for our midnight launches at stores and then participate in gaming tournaments all night. It really is awesome to see so many college football fans get excited about the game's launch."
Excuse me for sounding a bit giddy, but this year's version of "NCAA Football" looks incredible. On top of the fabulous screengrabs all over the Internet and the myriad of five-star reviews, there's a host of new elements to the game:
# A Weather Channel feature that apparently gives you the actual weather in real-time of wherever the fictional game is being played.
# Trick plays, including the "Statue of Liberty" and the shovel passes used by Boise State to beat Oklahoma in last year's Fiesta Bowl.
# You can now save your favorite plays, and then put them on YouTube and your MySpace page. (Sure, this sounds a bit weird — but hey, some people are into it ... I guess.)
# A Campus Legend mode in which you can make promises to young recruits. Not "Blue Chips"-style cars and gym bags promises, but playing time, a shot as a starter, etc. Pretty cool.
# The graphics. Supposedly, they're out of this world.
Then there's the rosters. Here's where I become an uber-geek about the game. Due to NCAA rules and regulations, EA can't legally use real player names. Instead, the company will name each player by their position and jersey number. Matt Leinart? QB #11. Reggie Bush? RB #5. And so on. You're technically able to input each player's actual name into the game through the "edit player" function. But who has enough time to do that for one team, let alone 100+?
Enter D.T. Linder.
One of the more controversial figures in the competitive gaming world, Linder slaves over hundreds of college football rosters months prior to the game's release, getting spelling right, depth charts correct, and red-shirts in line. When the game's finally released in July, Linder goes into hibernation, spends roughly seven days correctly giving the right names to every player in the game, and updating the depth charts to reveal accuracy and precision.
Through his site (
http://www.psxsports.com), you can get in touch with Linder and ensure you'll never have to deal with he name "QB #11" again. Leinart is Leinart, Bush is Bush, and Slaton and White are actually Slaton and White.
This D.T. Linder sounds like a knight in shining armor, right? A real man of the people!
Not quite. Message boards abound are dedicated to bringing Linder down, calling him everything from a "hack" and a "thief." This all goes back to an incident from a few years back.
According to one unnamed poster on the gaming site maddenmania.com, "A guy with the handle "Blacklover" created a roster file 3 years ago which had all the players named and such. At the time, a young lad was on our boards boasting about how great his rosters were going to be. Well, "Blacklover" released his set of rosters first, and then DT released his highly anticipated rosters, which definitely looked to be pretty solid soon after. Well...Blacklover was smart and put in some fake player names in his roster file on purpose. Push comes to shove, and the file DT is distributing that year contains the EXACT fake players as Blacklover. DT then went on a massive denial campaign, which I must say was pretty ridiculous."
Scandal!
Linder's response to such chatter? "Hey, when you are the original and most highly decorated roster editor, you expect to wear a target. It is church camp as an adolescent all over again. Remember those days when someone from your cabin starts dating the tallest girl in camp and the rest of the boys spread rumors that he picks his nose and has been wearing the same pair of underwear all week? When we release the rosters, the gang warfare will heat up again and a lot of people will start whacking each other with game controllers."
Well, I've never been to church camp. But I think I get the drift. Tremendous bravado out of D.T. Linder, to be certain. But, when you're the "original and most highly decorated roster editor" — I guess that's expected.
Who needs Ohio State vs. Michigan when we've got Linder vs. the world? Cue up the whacking. It's about that time.
In the end, though, it's not about the player names, who took the time to actually manually load the names, and/or being known as a "decorated roster editor."
Nope. It's all about "NCAA Football '08" and feeling 100 percent comfortable strolling into a video game store as a grown adult and buying a game on the very first day it's released.
Dorky? Weird? A little strange? Hey, call it what you will. I have no shame either way.
After all, it's tradition.
Now, if I could only find a place to get my hair cut in one of those airplane-shaped barber's chairs.
http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/7030698
07-19-2007, 04:09 PM
