I Was So Ready to Get My Football On

Today NCAA Football '07 is released. Today I have been waiting till work would end and I can pick it up on the way home. You see I prefer NCAA over Madden. I know that seems like heresy to say. Maybe it's because I like the college game over the NFL. The only reason I bought Madden last year was because NCAA made it so you could take the player you created and continue his career in the pros. Which really is brilliant on EA's part. Anyway, I was excited about the new game being released today. I could hear my 360 calling me. I was looking forward to creating a new player and get him into the school's Hall of Fame. I like the personal game elements in sports game. I loved how in The Show you could create a player and play simply as him till he got called to the big leagues. I wanted to create a graphical representation of myself doing things I can only dream about. This morning I started reading a few of the reviews. There were more for the PS2 and the Xbox than the 360 and that kind of worried me. Maybe it didn't come out today? I checked and sure enough it was coming out today. Then I found out something that through the monkey wrench into my child like excitement. The 360 version is actually missing features from the Xbox and PS2 version. One of those features is the Legend mode. I won't have the ability to create my own character. That's not the only feature it's missing too. There are no Spring Drills to determine your depth chart. The hot routes for both defense and offense are limited in their accessibility. The ESPN integration is lacking in comparison as well. My question is why does a game for a next gen system make me want to purchase the old gen version. Microsoft has completely buried the old Xbox, so why should the Xbox system have the better more comprehensive game? I realize this is really EA Sports doing, not Microsoft, but still. Next gen system games should never pale to the previous system's version. Madden for the 360 had the same problem, but I thought it was because the game was rushed to meet the launch date. Is this going to be a problem with all Xbox 360 sports games? Can they simply not fit everything with the graphical enhancements onto one disc? Since the PS3 is using bluray which has over twice as much storage capacity as the disc the Xbox uses, is the PS3 going to win in the features department. Is the 360 going to be limited because of the storage device it's games are on. Either way, I guess I'm buying an old gen game when I should be buying a next gen game.