First off the game boasts a new an improved visual engine that not only looks better, but also captures the feeling of college games. The presentation is very representative of a Saturday game, and the play-calling screen goes old school and is easy to choose your plays effectively. The player models are more proportionate to actual players, and the entire atmosphere is present in great detail as well. Each stadium is slick and unique, showing a varied personality on each campus you visit. You get the mascots, the bands, the crowd participation, and yes, the cheerleaders (male and female) to root your team on to greatness. While everything seems to be in place, the animations still seem years behind the other games in terms of sheer fluidness. Once again, your players seem to skate along the field when strafing left to right. The tackle animations, while improved along with gang tackles, still seem to miss a beat in the frames department. This far in the life span of the PS2, it may be hard for 989 to catch up to EA or even Sega, but you have to give them props for sticking to their guns and believing in their product by supporting and improving it every year.

Audio has also been bumped up a notch with some intelligent play-by-play calling that does a great job keeping pace with the fast and furious action on the play field. Added to the great commentary is some intuitive crowds that cheer and jeer at the correct time. Throw in some actual band music from all your favorite college fight songs, and you’ll be hard pressed not to get excited while playing this title.

The 989 football titles have been harshly punished by some atrocious game play that kept them in the below other titles since the late 1990’s. To follow suit with the better visuals and audio, 989 has really sat down and figured out how they led the PS One revolution for so long, as the game play has really been tweaked to perform better. It starts with a quicker and sharper A.I. that will challenge even the more savvy pigskin pro. The defense acts quickly off the snap, and the offense won’t be afraid to take those late quarter chances if the need to hit the end zone emerges. The outcome of this re-worked feel makes for not only a better playing game, but also very accurate, accumulated stats. Throw in a slew of new plays and playbooks and the whole package comes together quite nicely.

989 Sports has come off the line and brought their A game with a wealth of options that will impress gamers and provide many seasons of gaming, which holds up for many seasons. Your typical scrimmage, practice, exhibition and tournaments are here, along with a new a deep franchise mode that not only pits you as a coach or a player, but if you choose you can become a coordinator for a lesser team and work your way up to the head coaching duties. It’s this diversity that separates itself from other games compared to it. If that were all, I’d say that 989 Sports had it going on, but they also surprise us all this year with an online game that sacks to the opposition out of field goal range.

The game supports their own online service and is as smart and slick as offline, but now you have the human competitor to compete with, and this is where the game will live for most. All the essentials are there complete with voice communication. You can play one on one, in tourneys, leagues or even in a season against a slew of human competitors that are all vying for that Top 25 spot. The whole experience can be best compared to Microsoft’s XSN sports stat sheet, but has been improved with updated sports tickers that run along the screen during game play, so you are aware if “joebob987” has won his game to take over first place or not. It is this feature that will make or break most online players and to finally see who are the champs or the chumps around the online league.

Hopefully folks will get past the visuals which, while decent, still fall behind EA in overall standards. If gamers can do this, they are in for a real treat and a worthy purchase either instead of or in conjunction with EA Sports’ franchise. A great effort and points should be awarded for bringing all the important elements together in the style for what they were once known for. I’m sure there will be a new crop of fans that will rejoin 989 this year and recapture the some of the glory from year’s pasts, and hopefully forget the failures of recent attempts.