NCAA Football 10

Sometimes when you’re doing something as a group — team sport, band, whatever — everything kinda clicks, and you can almost feel it. This season, NCAA Football 10 has that feeling. Between some innovative new online features and a mess of shrewd tuning, it’s the kind of compulsively playable game that sports fans will have a hard time tearing themselves away from.

Our insta-favorite is the new Team Builder. On the web, you can use an impressively rich set of tools to craft everything from your team’s logo to their uniforms, field, roster, and more — you can even upload a jpeg to use as your logo. It’s hypnotizingly addictive to fuss over every detail, and we absolutely expect this feature to spawn the kind of creative community that produced so many dazzling paint jobs in Forza 2. In-game, you can grab teams from whoever you want, although EA does cap the number of teams you can down load at 13 (or 120 if you pay extra via DLC…ugh!). And while the web interface is brilliant, bizarrely, the in-game one is kinda clunky. Rather than automatically downloading the teams you built under your own Gamertag, it forces you to search for your own schools. It’s totally worth the trouble, though, because it’s really cool to see the team you kitted out in action on the field.

The other new biggie is Season Showdown, a meta-game where you pledge allegiance to one school for the whole year — the real-life year, not the game one. As you play NCAA, you rack up points for everything from making tackles to showing sportsmanship by not running up the score. The points of everyone who plays the game are tallied into a massive tournament that builds all season long toward a single-elimination tournament of the top 32 schools. The whole idea taps perfectly into the sports-gamer psyche — so many of us will be madly hooked on this.

And then there’s the way the on-field gameplay has just gelled. You’ll notice right away that the pursuit angles are way more realistic, and you can also break the feeble little tackles you should break, rather than going down almost anytime someone touches you. New strategic options — adjusting offensive/defensive parameters from aggressive to conservative, guessing whether the offense will pass or run, and chewing up the clock faster — add a lot, although one falls a bit short. Certain plays in the playbook are linked, and if you run one play enough, its linked play becomes “setup,” and you’re practically guaranteed big yards if you run it. It makes sense big-picture, but the links are limited and arbitrary, and to succeed at it, you feel forced to stick with a too-small number of plays.

Dynasty mode remains as awesome as ever, online or off. New ways of searching recruits and the addition of recruiting against another school kept us staring at those stats-heavy screens even more than usual…but we have one serious bone to pick. Offers to buy Dynasty Accelerators, which are essentially cheat codes for sale, are built into the game everywhere — in fact, they’re the very first thing that pops up when you start a dynasty! They temptingly offer better recruiting, coaching, training, and more…but when did cheat codes become something that costs extra when we’ve already bought a $60 game? It comes across as crass and greedy.

But if there’s one thing sports fans are used to tuning out, it’s advertising where it really doesn’t belong. And with NCAA 10 bringing so much great stuff to the table this year, we’ll be happy to keep our blinders on while we bury ourselves in some terrific college football.