Excited by the end of the NFL lockout, I just couldn't wait to get back to video game football. I purchased NCAA Football 12 last week, but haven't had much time to play it yet. But before I begin a Dynasty, I wanted to make sure that the rosters for my alma mater UNLV was as correct as I could make it.

I started with the rosters provided by Operation Sports user GamingTailgate. The guys at Operation Sports and Pasta Padre do a fantastic job with their rosters every year, and my hat's off to those guys for the tremendous work they do making sure that NCAA Football fans have accurate rosters for the new games as soon as possible. However, I noticed that they had made some glaring (but understandable) errors with the rosters for the UNLV Running Rebels.

UNLV isn't exactly a top-tier team. In fact, UNLV is a bottom-tier team. They only had two wins last year. So I'm sure that neither EA Sports nor Operation Sports cares too much about making sure the rosters are as up-to-date as possible for such a team. But I care, so I opened up the UNLV spring 2011 prospectus for reference.

The NFL may be in lockout still, but the NCAA is definitely going to be playing football this fall. Now that it's July, we're almost at the point where EA is ready to start releasing it's annual football titles. But first come the playable demos. I finally got some time to mess around with the NCAA Football 12 demo that was released earlier this week.

A few notes that I want to start with:

1. I was not able to record or take screenshots of my actual gameplay. So sadly, you'll have to take my word for it when I say something about how the game looks or plays, since I can't provide photographic or video proof.
2. The demo does not allow the user to access the instant replays. So I can't go into real detail examining any individual plays. I can only see what I see in real-time while playing the game. So I could be missing a lot of positive and/or negative aspects of the game that I'm just not noticing.
3. I played all my demo games on the All-American difficulty. I did not have access to sliders or any other control configurations, so everything is set to default.

A few posts ago, I previewed the first gameplay trailer for NCAA Football 2012. I didn't really have the time to go into depth about what the trailer showed and what the trailer didn't show, and I accepted the trailer on face value. Now, I'd like to spend some time and break down this trailer in a similar fashion as the Madden NFL 2012 teaser from back in March. Except unlike the Madden teaser, this time, I can actually see what's going on!

Table of contents

• First, a little eye candy: Presentation
• Onto the main attraction: Gameplay!
• Will the game really be "better"?
  • Line play
  • Tumbleweeds keep on a rollin'
  • Receiver play and coverage
• Has it earned my $60 yet?

First, a little eye candy: Presentation

Before I get into the gameplay trailer, I want to show you the presentation and tradition trailer that was released at about the same time.

There's some very nice stuff in this trailer!

This April has been a busy week for video games, and a very weird one, too. And the news has varied from good, to bad, to ugly, and everything in between. Here's some of the stuff that caught my attention:

Table of Contents

• Nintendo to reveal Wii 2 at E3 this June?
• PlayStation Network down for days
• Portal 2 available
• First NCAA Football 12 gameplay video
• Civilization V patch due out

I recently had the misfortune of needing to send my PS3 into Sony for servicing. Something was wrong with the graphics card and was creating very unpleasant graphical artifacts and texture issues on most of my games. EA Sports games such as Madden and NCAA were very badly affected. Fallout New Vegas would sometimes go completely black on me. Metal Gear Solid 4 saw some very irritating texture pop-ins and coloration issues. Even the Back to the Future downloadable game from the PSN was suffering from similar problems...

Sony's customer service is horrible. Not the service. Just the policies, the way that the hardware is configured, and the lack of respect that the whole process has for the consumer. I don't understand how they are still in business when repairing a $600 piece of hardware goes something like this:

"Thank you for calling Sony Customer Support. Oh, you're PS3 broke. Well that's too bad. Go ahead and back up your hard drive even though none of it can be restored onto a replacement system anyway. Pay us $130. And then send the system in. If we feel like fixing it, we will. But we probably won't, cuz that would require, like, you know, work. So we'll send you a replacement and inconvenience you even more by making it impossible for you to restore your save files and downloadable content. Thank you and have a nice day. Or a shitty day. Whatever."