TheXboxLife

The new release from EA, NCAA Football 08 has been very promising, and has had a great response from consumers. Though there are not a ton of new additions/changes, the ones that were made definitely improved the game overall. Look forward to a new Game Mode, Campus Legend, which gives the user the ability to go back to Senior year of High School, compete in the State Tournament, and basically decide your own collegiate career. Schools will offer you different options, depending on the program and specifically, your stats from the State Tournament. This is a very cool new game mode, considering if your school doesn’t offer you a spot, you can always try to make it as a walk on.



When you first start earn your D1 spot on the depth chart, you’ll move up by participating in practices to earn points. Eventually, you’ll make it to the #1 spot, and you’ll never be removed for not going to practice. As a student, you will also go to class, and take on other extra-curricular activities. This will give you the ability to gain even more points to climb the depth chart.



The Dynasty mode is still the same, so the developers didn’t touch that (thank you). You’ll have all the same options to choose your school, change playbooks, pick your schedule and play your games. There is also the mock layout of ESPN.com to display all the ‘current’ college football news.



As for the game play, it hasn’t changed. Offense is the same, while Defense offers a new Hit Stick 2.0. This may, or may not turn out to be an advantage for the Offense, because it’s a little difficult to get used to hitting a player high or low. This means that Offensive players may leap over you because you tackled low, when you really meant to hit them high. Of course, in between plays you’ll see players walking through each other, but in the end, who’s really that picky about something like that?



Overall, great game, and should do well to compete with other new college football game releases.



9/10

If your not familiar with Project Falcon, it’s the name for the new board that will be used in the XBOX 360 Elite and Halo 3 Special Edition boxes. What’s the big deal you may ask? Current XBOX 360 boards run with a 90-nanometer chip, which is partly responsible for the overwhelming amount of XBOX 360 defective reports. Because of this large number of defective XBOX 360, Microsoft has offered [over a three-year period since purchase] an option to send your console back to Microsoft for a FREE fix. Good for consumers [because it's free], but horrible for Microsoft because they end up taking their Engineers and Hardware experts out of the drawing room, and back into “how can we make the next version not crash like this one?”

The reason why Falcon is so important is because it will introduce a new 65-nanometer chip which will result in less heating issues. Now, this isn’t ‘new’ technology. This is something that has been around for a few months with Intel & IBM. Originally, the plan for XBOX was to release a new board technology every 2 years, taking 1 year for the new board design, and 2 years for the chip technology. Obviously, consumers are overdue for a new type of stable board.

A big problem is Microsoft doesn’t know what it’s competitors plans are for introducing the 65-nanometer chip in their consoles. Right now it looks like the Falcon boards will be available by Christmas, probably to accompany the release of the highly anticipated Halo 3 game. Now, Microsoft still has a huge quantity of the 90-nanometer (original) console boxes, and those must sell before they begin selling the new 65-nanometer Falcon boards with the console. This not only means that Microsoft is going to possibly loose even more money then they already have with XBOX, but also that consumers who choose to purchase an XBOX before the new chips are accompanied with all the consoles, will not be able to tell which chip/board they are getting. This makes it not just a risk for consumers, but also for Microsoft and the possibility that consumers wait for the new stable systems.

story compiled from here/here

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Categories: News
Author: mike