NCAA Football 10 Sliders

I've noticed a number of hits on this blog for my NCAA Football 10 posts, and a few of them use the keyword "sliders" in the search. For those who don't know, the artificial intelligence in the game can be adjusted to add or subtract difficulty from the game depending on your own skill level.

Anyway, for those of you who are searching for good sliders for your game, I thought I would post the ones I use for my Iowa State dynasty (and I'll watch the rest of the blog traffic click away from this post right about.....now).

I got these sliders from one of the posters on the Xbox Forums for the game (I can't remember which one). As I played, I tweaked a couple of them, but these sliders give me a very good game (though those of you who feel that Iowa State should forever be in the basement of NCAA Football will probably think I've made these sliders too easy).

Anyway, here they are:
Quarter Length: 7:00
Skill: All-American
All the rest "On" except "Quiz the Quarterback"


User Offense:
QB Accuracy: 40
Pass Blocking: 45
WR Catching: 50
RB Ability: 50
Run Blocking: 50

CPU Offense:
QB Accuracy: 60
Pass Blocking: 65
WR Catching: 45
RB Ability: 80
Run Blocking: 45

User Defense:
Pass Coverage: 60
Pass Rush: 60
Interceptions: 25
Rush Defense: 25
Tackling: 60

CPU Defense:
Pass Coverage: 50
Pass Rush: 60
Interceptions: 25
Rush Defense: 60
Tackling: 50

User Special Teams:
FG Power: 20
FG Accuracy: 20
Punt Power: 50
Punt Accuracy: 10
Kickoff Power: 55

CPU Special Teams:
FG Power: 25
FG Accuracy: 50
Punt Power: 70
Punt Accuracy: 70
Kickoff Power: 55

Penalties:
Offsides: 85
False Start: 85
Holding: 50
Facemask: 50
Offensive Pass Interference: 90
Defensive Pass Interference: 90
KR/PR Interference: 90
Clipping: 55
Intentional Grounding: 85
Roughing the Passer: 85
Roughing the Kicker: 100

Despite the high settings for some of those, I still have never seen them called. I've never seen Offensive Pass Interference called, nor KR/PR Interference, and no Intentional Grounding except when I do it myself. And, even at 100, I've never seen Roughing the Kicker. Oh well!!!

These give me great and appropriate stats, though I may upgrade the CPU run defense a bit. My running back won the Heisman two years ago.

Let me know if they work for you!

Iowa State - National Football Champions!!!!

Yes, I know that will never happen in my lifetime in real life, so I have to do it myself.

Just won the BCS Championship game in NCAA Football 10, beating USC 34-14. Took me until the 2014 season to do it.

All of you ISU alumni can share the victory with me, since I'm beginning to wonder if the world will end before the real team actually does it.

Allow me my moment of glory. :)

NCAA Football 10 - Road to Glory Update

I've been working on my Iowa State dynasty in NCAA Football 10, so I haven't returned to my own, personal college career as starting quarterback of the Iowa State Cyclones in "Road to Glory" mode since I last posted about it here. So I decided to do a bit more today. Especially because I'm getting a lot of hits on the blog from those doing a search on this.

Unfortunately, absence has not made the heart grow fonder. And the more I play it, the less I'm enjoying it.

Don't get me wrong. It's very cool to follow one guy throughout his college career. I love the idea of it. I just don't like the execution now that I've gone a few weeks into my first season.

Here are some of the problems with it:

NCAA Football 10 - Road to Glory Beginning

I had a bit of extra time last night before bed, so I decided to give the Road to Glory mode in NCAA Football 10 a whirl, seeing if I might like it.

I have to say that I didn't know what I was missing. So far, it's quite cool.

What is "Road to Glory?" Basically, you create a football player, play through your high school tournament and get scholarship offers from various colleges. You then choose which one you want to go to, and ultimately try to become a Heisman Trophy winner (or at least give a good account of yourself).

You choose which position you want to play, you name your player, you choose your home town, and you even name your high school! So, I created an option-oriented quarterback named David Roy from Davenport West high school. So far, I've only had the chance to play two of the four high school tournament games, but it's still been a cool experience. After each game, it tells you how you did and which colleges were in attendance at the game. It will be cool to see what happens when you're actually playing a college game. Maybe the announcers will say my name!

One cool thing about Road to Glory, which will shorten how long it takes to play each game, is that you only play while you're on the field. If you're not on the field (say your team's defense is on the field), then you can either sim each play, watch each play, or just sim until you're on the field again. Since you're not the coach, you don't even call the plays (though if you're a quarterback, you can audible). Thus, it really wouldn't be a good idea to make yourself a punter or something like that.

This is a seriously cool thing, and I don't know why I never tried it last year. I will have to alternate between coaching Iowa State to the National Championship (STOP LAUGHING OVER THERE!) and watching myself rise through the ranks of college football.

I feel like this game has just been given a new life, not that it was close to expiring before.

NCAA Football 10 for Xbox 360 - Later Impressions

In my previous post, I gave some first impressions of NCAA Football 10 after having only played a game and a half. Now, with 12 games under my belt, I feel like I have a little more to go on to give a fair assessment of the gameplay. I haven't done the "Road to Glory", where you take a player through the entire college experience, only playing your guy and not the entire team like you do in the regular game. I don't know if I will do this or not.

I have, however, done my favourite thing to do in sports video games: set up a dynasty. I'm using my beloved Iowa State Cyclones (who, admittedly suck big time this year, and you can see that in the player ratings) and I'm trying to coach them to the National Championship! Well, maybe next year...or a few years from now, at this rate. I'm currently 5-6 and having a lot of fun with it.

But this is a post about impressions of the game, so let's go to the Big Board and see what there is to say about it.

NCAA Football 10 - Xbox 360 (First Impressions)

After doing my post this morning, reading some Twitter, and writing my one outstanding book review, I decided to stick NCAA Football 10 into my Xbox and fire it up. It immediately had an update to download, but I believe that was mostly a roster update. Per US law, college athletes cannot have their likenesses and names in a published video game or anything like that, but the players themselves are in there. If John Smith, Running Back for the University of Iowa, is #34 and is 5'11 and 190 pounds, that's what he is in the game as well. He's just not named.

Thankfully, the user community is very dedicated and they create rosters which have all of the names in there. Yes, that's right, 119 teams, 35 players (or so) on each team. So the first thing I did was download one of these rosters so that all of the names are accurate. Then I went ahead and tried the game, choosing my alma mater, Iowa State University.

Note, this isn't a review, as I've only played 1.5 games. Instead, these are just some impressions from these games, in no particular order.

1) Given I've only had half of a game with the actual announcers, I have to say that my first impressions of the announcing team is disappointment. Once again, Brad Nessler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Lee Corso are the main announcers. That's fine, and they don't do a bad job. But everything I heard from them was exactly the same as last year! A few new formations that they have to say, but that was it! I sincerely hope that I was just unlucky and that they do actually say some different stuff as I play further. I would be very happy if they just removed the bad jokes between Corso and Herbstreit. Erin Andrews has been added as a sideline reporter, but all she does is give injury updates.

2) I started a dynasty (I'm going to take Iowa State to the BCS Championship!), and once again there is no link to ESPN except the announcing team themselves. No "College Football This Week" or anything like that. 2K Sports was doing this with their NFL franchise 5 years ago, and probably more! I don't know if EA Sports' NCAA Basketball game has one or not, but 2K Sports did before they had to cancel last year's edition. Why is this so hard? It immerses you in your dynasty, making you feel even more like you're part of the whole NCAA football tableau. Instead, all you have is some "newspaper" reports on your team and other events around the league. That's fine, but something animated would be greatly appreciated.

3) It's hard to say since I haven't adjusted any of the AI sliders at all, but running seems to be a lot more realistic this year, at least from what I've seen. I was actually able to break a couple long ones for touchdowns, instead of getting stuffed at the line 80% of the time.

4) I'm also impressed with the passing game, at least in one sense. I haven't played it long enough to know whether there are any AI problems in the passing game, but one thing I loved is that the quarterback can throw up a floater when he's hit as he's throwing. I think that may have happened last year, but nowhere near often enough. Too often, the guy would either get sucked into a sack because the collision detection caused the players to go into "tackle" mode, or the guy would get off an amazing throw even though he got hit a split second after throwing it. Already in the games I've played, I've had the quaterback get hit while he's throwing, and the ball just floats as it should. Of course, it's possible this will be overdone, as EA has done this before, fixing changing something from not happening at all to happening too often.

5) The Dynasty mode, at least at the beginning, seems to be pretty similar to last year, just with a different presentation. One thing I do like, though I don't know yet how it will affect things, is how you can recruit *against* other schools that the recruit is considering going to. Say you're 4th on the recruit's list of schools to choose from. Nebraska's #1. You can recruit against Nebraska, seeing what the recruit is interested in and try to downplay it if Nebraska actually offers a better shot at that than you do (such as playing time, or team prestige). It should be interesting to see how that works.

I'm going to keep playing, of course, and I will probably post further impressions as I move further along. There are some differences from last year that I just haven't done yet (like "Season Showdown"), but overall, there is a lot that's the same, at least in presentation and dynasty mode. I haven't played enough to know how well the new stuff works, but I can already tell you that next year's game had better improve on the presentation and dynasty, or I will be greatly disappointed.

*edit:* I almost forgot the new way injuries are handled, at least part of the time. I had this happen once in the game, where one of my guys was injured but was returning to the game. It actually asked me if I wanted him to return, even though he was at greater risk of getting re-injured. I don't know if it will do all of the injury animation and stats reduction that Madden 10 is supposed to do this year, but it's a good start, anyway.