Are you ready for some simulated electronic football

I'm only 24 years old, and so I'm firmly within the range of the Information Age generation, or whatever the hell you want to call people who have lived most of their lives with the internet existing. Combine that with the fact that I was a CS major in college, and in theory I should be pretty up on technology and used to the pace at which its currently advancing. All that said, every once in a while I do still get a "holy crap, this is like some Jetson's type shit here!" moment, and I had one of those moments playing NCAA Football 10, which I just picked up. Its the first sports game I've bought in roughly five years, and the first football game I've owned since NCAA 2004. While its certainly been tweaked and refined, the actual gameplay is roughly the same as it has been at its core. That's not really what I find so impressive about it. Rather, what I find so amazing is how throughly it incorporates online content into the game.

Any time you're browsing through menus, rather than actually being in-game, the game will play the latest actual Sportscenter update from ESPN Radio and on the bottom of your screen, you get an actual news and scores ticker. When you start a new exhibition game when the weather settings pop up, they default to the actually time of day, and actual temperature and conditions of your real-life location, based on weather.com. All of these little tidbits are cool, but the centerpiece of the online content is the new Teambuilder feature. Up to this point, create-a-team modes in spots games--if they even existed--have been pretty crude and rudimentary. You could pick from a few generic logos, pick your team colors, create a roster, etc. It never ended up being all that satisfying though. It never completely felt like a "real" team the same way all of the default teams that came packaged with the game did. With the new Teambuilder feature, all of that is now online. Teams are made on EA's website, and can then be searched for by anyone else with the game on their console. You're given 12 slots to download teams initially, and can buy more with micro-transactions (Side note: some of the micro-transactions in the game are pretty silly, like buying a new "pipeline" state for recruits for your Dynasty team. Are there really people willing to spend actual money to make recruiting easier for their fake football team?), so you have plenty of room to mess around and try out teams that people have made.

Obviously, a big way this is going to be used is to circumvent the rule that actual player names can't be used in NCAA games, but there's a whole plethora of teams you can find. Searching for teams in Bloomington, Illinois brings up a couple of different iterations of my alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan, a Division III team that's never going to actually exist as a default, on the disc team in any game. But with the Teambuilder function, they exist with all of their actual logos and a field reasonably close looking to their actual one. Hat tip to EA for coming up with a very cool idea and implementing it well.