Another year, another EA sports college football game. The Demo for NCAA Football 11 was released on Xbox Live and PSN today, so how does it stack up?

First and foremost, the game LOOKs a lot better than the previous year's game. In fact, it may even look better than last year's Madden (which looked great). Pre game rituals and plenty of ESPN graphics and music give the game some early flair. But the Omni-present ESPN graphics actually felt a bit too much, like EA was trying to force it down my throat that it has ESPN theme. Referees are finally back on the field, although so far, they don't seem to be too interactive. You can't run into them, the ball can't hit them, and they don't respot the ball after plays (the ball seems to just magically re-appear when you run the hurry-up). The game's lighting and textures also look about a thousand times better than last year's game (although the Pre-game has some noticeable shading and texture popping, particularly just before a camera cut). Kirk Herbstreet and Brad Nessler return for commentary in the game, but Lee Corso seems to be missing. I miss him already.

In NCAA 10, players did not cast shadows on themselves or each otherNCAA Football 11 has better shading, textures, and color

The first thing I noticed about the game is that the controls feel much more fluid and intuitive. Part of that might be because I just spent the last 2 weeks playing Backbreaker, and EA chose to use a control scheme similar to Backbreaker's for this year's games. Spinning with a circular movement of the right stick, and being able to do multiple stutter steps and combo jukes gives the user much more freedom of expression when controlling the ball carrier. The new "Locomotion" engine that is designed to more accurately depict player's agility and acceleration (rather than just immediately jumping to max straight-line speed), has also already had a huge impact on the game for me. In my very first game, I noticed that a screen pass actually worked, even though my running back was covered. The defender happened to be a big, slow, defensive end, and after I released the ball, instead of it bouncing off the defender's back (as it would have in previous years), my QB actually LEAD the running back towards the sideline. The running back accelerated past the defensive end, made the completion, and got me a 15 yard first down. I've also noticed the effect of acceleration and quicker changes of direction when wide receivers are being covered by linebackers (especially in man). And if timed correctly, a pass thrown just as a receiver makes his cut on a post or corner route can be devastating, since the defensive back is still backpedalling and has to change direction to follow the receiver. This allows the receiver to get in much better position to make a catch and appear to be much more wide open than he actually was (since the DB is struggling to catch up), whereas in previous years, the defensive back would have been matching him step-for-step, and probably would jump the route and knock down or intercept the ball. So far, the system is working nicely, but I'll be interested to see how it holds up when the game's difficulty goes up to All American or Heisman.

Traditionally, the EA football games have been known for "cheating" at higher difficulties. Yes, mom, the game actually does cheat. All those years of me yelling at the TV were not just me being a whiner. In the demo, I've already noticed plenty of problems with the game's circumstantial animation system forcing me into canned animations that I don't want. For example, the PRO-TAK feature (imported from last year's Madden), is appearing in this year's game, but so far in the demo, it seems to be sorely under-utilized. In one instance, I was attempting to stop the CPU from converting a 3rd and long. the CPU completed a pass to the middle of the field, and my corner back proceeded to tackle the wide receiver, but the animation the game chose pushed the receiver forward over the first down marker. However, in real football, the first down probably would have been stopped, since I had a safety converging on the play from downfield. He got to the receiver just before he crossed the first down marker, but instead of hitting him and pushing him back to stop the first down, the safety just rolled onto the ground next to the receiver as the receiver continued to fall forward because the game had already committed to that particular tackle animation. So I have no doubt that the famous Madden force fields and context-sensitive animation-selection will eventually come into play to hinder my performance on higher difficulties. But that is to be expected.

The Play Calling screen has also been radically overhauled. For better, and for worse. The new system abandons paging in favor of linear scrolling through the available plays. This is very time-consuming, and with only a 25-second play clock, we don't have too much time to waste navigating through dozens of plays. The game defaults to a "Basic" mode where a set of just 15 plays are given to you based on situation, and you only have to chose one of them. This is nice, and somewhat believable, since real football coaches don't open up their 300-page play book between every play, but rather just check a cheat-sheet of about a dozen plays to call for a given situation. But the real problem with the play-call screen is lag. Navigating and moving up or down the menus takes a LONG time. And again, in a game where you only have 25 seconds to navigate and find a play, every second - every half second - counts. One nice addition to the play call screen is that on defense, the game now shows both the positions AND numbers of the offensive personnel. This is a very nice feature, and I now that's it in a game, I can't believe its taken this long for someone to think of it.

Running the No Huddle offense now brings up the full playbook for you to choose in a window. Its too bad UNLV ditched Mike Sanford in favor of a more traditional coach this year, otherwise it could have been fun to play around with Sanford's No Huddle Spread in this year's game. UNLV obviously wan't in the demo, so I'll have to wait and see if the folks at EA will have managed to get the new coach's playbook correct, since this is his first year at UNLV.

My personal favorite new feature, however, is the improved blocking logic. Players now follow better, assignment-based blocking, rather than just going after the guy right in front of him. In fact, the Coach Cam Play Art will now even show the exact blocking assignment for each blocker against the defense that lines up against you. The game will draw the head-up blocks, pulls, kickouts, reaches, second-level blocks, and so forth, and show exactly which player each lineman is supposed to block. Of course, whether or not he gets there is a different story. I even saw the diagram change as the defense moved and shifted around prior to the snap. Hopefully, the blocking holds up on higher difficulties, and hopefully the slide existing slide protection blocking feature doesn't conflict with the new blocking logic, but I'll have to wait and see. I've been begging every year for better offensive line play, and now its finally gotten some attention. Hopefully its worthwhile.

A few minor gripes I have with the demo:

None of the teams featured are an Option ****offense, and the short, 2-minute quarter length means that its hard to get a feel of the whole game, especially the new No Huddle system, since the quarter or half will be over before I can get a sustained drive going. I also didn't particularly care for the new action replays. The camera is too low to the ground and zoomed in, and it cuts too frequently between focus on different areas of the field. It makes it very hard to see what actually happened during a play. I prefer the old Press Box and Sky Cam replays that allowed me to see the blocks develop and watch coverage downfield. But I can always just watch a manual replay if I need to study the play.

Finally, I caught a MAJOR glitch in the game: In Overtime, the CPU won the coin toss but chose to play offense first. In college football, it is well established that team who win the toss are supposed to chose to play DEFENSE FIRST, that way, the offense will know how many points it needs to not lose the game. Hopefully, this will be fixed.