I’ve never been a huge fan of sports games. When it comes to college basketball, my first game was College Slam on Super Nintendo. The most recent college basketball game I had played before NCAA Basketball 2009 was NCAA March Madness 2005. Having played those games, what do I think of NCAA Basketball 2009?
Every time you first start up a game, you are asked to pick your favorite college team. While I expect this to happen the first time, Why do I have to pick my favorite college team every time I start the game? This data could be saved even if it had to be on your memory card.
There is a dynasty and a season mode. If you pay attention to the statistics of players and want to deal with trades, you would probably want to pick the dynasty mode because one dynasty mode consists of thirty seasons.
Usually, I skip the training camp in sports games but I tried it out in this one. All you do is decide how much time your players will spend training in Shooting, Offense, Defense, and Conditioning. There are no mini-games, you just adjust four sliders.
When you are on your season calendar and you want to skip to your next game, you have to wait for other games to be simulated. Why would I care about games that don’t involve the team I’m controlling?
When you play a game with your chosen team and go to halftime, here is another thing that annoyed me. You may see cheerleaders for five seconds and you may see the mascot of the team running around but then the second half of the game starts. In games like College Slam, your coach would discuss strategy and the coach of your opposition would do the same. However, there are no strategy talks during halftime in this game.
There are problems with AI. The opposing team gave me seven free throw opportunities throughout a twelve-minute game. Your teammates aren’t much better. One of my teammates passed the ball to an offsides teammate who ended up getting turned over because that pass was a backcourt violation. Why would your partner pass to an offsite teammate when he had two partners near him on the same half of the court?
There are multiple tournaments to choose from in the game. One tournament lets you choose to play as legendary teams from the past and there is a tournament in Maui that has its arena.
There are rivalry games where your opponent will automatically be the number one rival of the team you pick. It shows you who is the number one rival of your team when you are on the team selection so you know who you will be facing when you pick your team.
There are mascot games where both teams playing will have all their players dress up as the mascot for their respective teams. There are also college classics where you play notable games that happened in the past.
I have no problem with the controls. They work fine. Nothing is too hard to pull off. So I wouldn’t change anything about the controls. One thing I didn’t like about the sound was the marching band music that played during menus. It’s alright at first but since you hear it all the time while in the menus, it just gets old after a while.
The gameplay is a lot of fun because there are a lot of different modes to try out. The game is easy although the AI controlling the computer could be better. I have no problem with the controls or graphics. The marching theme band gets old after a while. However, all the different modes mean this game has a lot of replayability so I give NCAA Basketball 2009 a 7 out of 10. If you like basketball and have a PlayStation 2, you will enjoy this game.
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