Well, I don't know how the Bears are going to play during the regular season, or if they'll make the playoffs, but it kinda felt like they won the 2024 preseason. The Bears went 4-0 in the preseason, and absolutely dominated all 4 teams they played, including both the Buffalo Bills and the defending NFL champion Chiefs.

The defense was particularly stifling. Watching these preseason games almost looked like watching the '85 Bears' playoff run. Opposing teams simply could not move the ball, and the Bears dominated field position and time of possession.

Unfortunately, going undefeated in the preseason has been a bit of an albatross for NFL teams throughout history. The 2008 Lions and 2017 Browns both went winless in the regular season after having won all 4 of their preseason games. More generally, since 2010, teams that won all their preseason games would not do well in the regular season. Most would have losing records when all was said and done.

On the flipside, no team in this century has won the SuperBowl after failing to win a single preseason game. This does not bode well for the defending champion Chiefs, who lost all their preseason games, including the one against the Bears.

Something that doesn't help the analysis of the Bears' perfect preseason is the fact that the performance of the starters was lukewarm at best. It was really the backups who lit things up. It's hard to judge the Bears' top 2 draft picks because they didn't see a ton of action. Caleb Williams had a few good plays and showed a lot of the improvisational excitement that he was known for at USC. But all those theatrics did not result in many points, as the Bears' starting unit was mostly stagnating in the red zone and kicking field goals.

Rome Odunze almost had a touchdown against the Bengals, if only he'd stayed in-bounds.

There could have been a highlight touchdown between these 2, if Odunze had kept his feet in-bounds for a catch at the back of the endzone after a Caleb William's scramble. In Rome's defense, the sidelines and back lines were not fully painted. Usually, the lines around the perimeter of a football field are thick, solid white lines that are several yards wide. But in the preseason, these lines were hollow, so Rome may have thought he was inside the endzone because he was looking at the exterior line, instead of the interior line. In the regular season, he will hopefully be more aware of where he is on the field.

Well, I hate to have to do this, but I have to make a bit of a retraction to my previous blog about College Football 25. As many of you probably know, I posted a pair of blogs a few weeks back, expressing some of my biggest challenges with College Football 25. Those blogs were focused on the difficulty of the kicking meter, and problems that I was having adjusting to the revised option controls.

I stand by most of what was presented in both of those blogs. After all, the core complaint of both was the lack of tutorials and a Skill Trainer to teach the new mechanics, and the lack of difficulty and customization settings to make these mechanics easier to use for people who are struggling. The lack of such features is still an absolutely valid complaint, and EA has yet to take any steps to address it, other than to include QR Codes linking to online tutorial videos, which you have to watch on a separate device because EA didn't even bother to include links to view the tutorials on the console's browser. I mean, heck, the controller summary in the pause menu still does not show any of the read option or kicking controls, nor does it explain that the Switch Stick exists or how it works.

I may have misread this option tutorial pop-up (which only ever appeared once).

But I will admit that I was actually largely wrong about one of my biggest complaints with the option mechanic. I want to correct that error here, and explain how this mechanic actually works. I had previously explained that I was struggling with the new mechanic of having to hold the X button (on the PS5) in order for the QB to keep the ball on a read option hand-off play, and how the input windows didn't seem to line up with the actual mesh point animation for the hand-off. It turns out the the mesh point timing window is not actually broken after all, and my problems were almost entirely the result of me not understanding how the mechanic actually works.

Somehow, I got the mistaken impression that the user is supposed to hold the X button through the mesh animation in order to keep the ball, and could release the button at any point to hand off the ball. As such, I was pressing and holding X through the snap of the ball, and then continuing to hold X into the mesh point animation, and then trying to release X to hand off the ball.

Setting tool-tips to "Always On"
actually permanently disabled them.

That's not how the mechanic works. In fact, looking back at the Option tutorial pop-up, that's not what it said to do. So I misread it, and because there's no way to bring these tutorial pop-ups back up, or to view the controls in any of the menus, I didn't realize my mistake till much later. I tried resetting the the tutorials in the game's settings, but I think that actually had the opposite effect of completely and permanently disabling all tutorials and tool-tips, with no ability to turn them back on. This is a bug that EA needs to fix, and as far as I know, it has not yet been fixed.

I've been anxiously awaiting the start of UNLV's 2024 football season. Last year's unprecedented success caught me off-guard, and I was afraid that it would be a fluke Cinderella story that would not repeat. Especially after standout QB Jaydan Maiava transferred to USC, I was afraid that UNLV would not be able to replicate last year's success.

Well, they certainly got 2024 off to a good start with a blow-out (almost shut-out) victory over Big 12 Houston Cougars. UNLV appeared dominant in all phases of the game. In fact, they were actually more dominant than the final score makes it appear, since they had multiple score-less trips the redzone after failing to convert a fourth down and having a field goal blocked. This could easily have been a 37-0 shut-out.

But at the same time, I'm not sure if the victory was as much a dominating performance by UNLV, or just an abysmal performance by Houston. Watching the game on Saturday afternoon, it looked to me like Houston's offense (and starting quarterback Donovan Smith, in particular) were just not prepared to play football Saturday night. Donovan Smith was off-target, took sacks, made a lot of bad decisions, and just generally looked like a deer caught in headlights. When backup QB Ui Ale came in late in the 4th quarter, he and Houston's offense carved through UNLV's defense like butter and scored a seemingly effortless touchdown. Maybe UNLV had all its backups in on defense at that point. It's hard to tell on broadcast cameras.

I really do not think that UNLV's defense is quite as good as it looked against Houston. I think it was mostly just a bad game by Houston's offense, and by Donovan Smith especially. If that backup QB had been playing earlier in the game, Houston surely would have scored more than 7 points. If he had started the game, who knows? Maybe Houston would have won.

That being said, the defense does look a lot better than it has been in the past. Defense has always been an Achilles' heel for UNLV's football team. They have a long-standing history of letting opposing offenses get away with mistakes, and of giving up big plays down the field in critical situations. Last year, the defense played better than usual, helping to take UNLV to the Mountain West Championship game and a bowl. In this case, however, Houston played poorly and made a lot of mistakes, and UNLV's defense punished Houston for almost every mistake they made. This defense did not let Houston get away bad play. That is an improvement, and it is worth celebrating!

Photo credit: UNLV Athletics.

UNLV's defense punished Houston's offense for every mistake it made, including this pick-6 on a screen pass.

This is about the time of year when I would be working on a review of the new Axis Football video game. But that won't be happening this year. Fans of the indie Axis Football video game series will have to wait another year to get their hands on a new release of the game. Earlier this year, the development studio, Axis Games, announced (via the company developer blog) that they will be moving the game to a bi-annual release schedule. That means a new edition of Axis Football will only be released once every 2 years, instead of every year. As such, there will not be an Axis Football 25, and the next game will be Axis Football 26, which will presumably launch sometime in fall of 2025.

This is bittersweet news. On the one hand, I usually have a good time playing Axis Football each year, and am disappointed that I won't have a new version to play this year.

On the other hand, the new schedule will supposedly give the development studio more time to make more substantive updates for each new release of the game. The rate at which the game was improving has been slowing down the past few years, and a lot more of the features have felt incomplete or un-polished. We also weren't really getting broad updates each year. New features and upgrades were becoming increasingly narrow and focused on a few distinct areas of gameplay. In any given year, we would get either Franchise updates, or gameplay updates, but rarely both.

For example, last year's game include a new playbook editor, but the game lacks the variety of plays and schemes that really make a custom playbook worthwhile.

Axis Football 23 was actually one of the best single-year upgrades for the series, owing largely to dramatic improvements in catch and pass defense animations, and an innovative player-in-motion system. But as good as that release was, it didn't have any new Franchise features. Well, at least not any explicit Franchise features. The other gameplay features, such as a new fatigue system, did have knock-on effects that indirectly improved the Franchise experience.

In any case, this new release schedule will hopefully mean that Axis Games can include substantial gameplay upgrades, and also Franchise updates, and also maybe new features, all in a single new release. Instead of having to spend time supporting an updated a new release every year, and also trying to port the game to consoles and phones, Axis can spend that time working on more features and updates. Hopefully, the result of all of this will be that Axis Football 26 will be the best release of the game so far!

Axis Games is releasing developer blogs about new features of the next game.

Unfortunately, Axis Games is still a very small indie studio. In fact, lead designer Danny Jugan might be the only full-time employee. I know they used to have some part-time developers, but I'm not sure how much (if any work) those individuals still do on the game. So they are still going to be limited in what they can do, and we can't expect a quantum leap in one new release.

I criticized Deliver Us The Moon for its depiction of a near-future environmental apocalypse. These sorts of apocalyptic depictions of climate change can cause people to take the real-life threat less seriously, since it's slower and less dramatic than the fictional depictions that people see. I tried to give Deliver Us The Moon the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that the developers were maybe going for more of a "overpopulation and depletion of resources" kind of apocalypse, and less of a "anthropogenic climate change due to greenhouse emmissions" apocalypse. However, Deliver Us Mars makes more explicit reference to greenhouse gasses and climate change, so I feel like my earlier criticism is a bit vindicated.

That being said, flashbacks show an Earth that is very much still alive, as opposed to the previous game, which made the Earth look like a barren wasteland. Flashbacks show the character and her family hiking through forests and diving among coral, while talking to each other about how much of a shame it is that the forests and coral are dying off and probably won't exist for very long. As the game goes on, we see extreme weather events, and examples of the damage they can cause and the danger they represent. Deliver Us Mars also highlights some of the socio-economic complications of overpopulation, with clear divides between "haves" and "have-nots".

Overall, I like this depiction of environmental collapse a lot better than in the previous game. It's a much more nuanced and (importantly) accurate depiction of the near future of climate change, and it shows the personal and individual cost of climate change at small scales, rather than making it an apocalyptic, planet-destroying event. It's still blunt and heavy-handed in its delivery, but it's far less exaggerated this time around.

The depiction of climate change is much more accurate and nuanced this time around.

Martian sight-seeing

Deliver Us The Moon felt like it peaked early, with a lot of the first-person, zero-G set pieces. After landing on the moon, so much of the rest of the game was just walking around sterile space station interiors. There was like 1 or 2 short sequences driving a rover on the lunar surface, but that was it. The player hardly got to explore the lunar surface at all.

Deliver Us Mars follows a similar progression path. It starts with zero-G segments on the rocket approaching Mars and a space station in orbit of Mars, before crash-landing on Mars. Then the rest of the game is walking around Mars. Despite this similar progression path, Deliver Us Mars is far less monotonous than its predecessor, as it varies the scenery and gameplay a lot more. There's frequent flashbacks to the protagonist's childhood, in which she hikes, climbs, and scuba-dives with her family in playable vignettes. These sequences are very much on-rails, and don't give the player hardly any freedom of exploration, but they are a welcome break from sterile, claustrophobic white walls.

The player spends more time walking and driving on the Martian surface, instead of claustrophobic space stations.

More importantly, there's a much larger focus on exploring the Martian surface. This takes the form of rover trips between levels, and some outdoor levels that require the player to climb and platform across Martian cliffs and canyons.