First NCAA Basketball 09 Screens and Blog
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Operation Sports has received the first screenshots and producer blog for NCAA Basketball 09. You can check out the screens here and the blog here. The producer blog details the use of the NBA Live engine and how they’ve improved upon it and made it unique for the college game.
As a production team, we all knew that we had to continue to invest in creating an authentic college basketball experience. We needed to continue to capture everything that is unique about college basketball – from the mascots and cheerleaders to the amazingly unique venues to the student sections and fight songs. Also, and probably more importantly, we had to recreate the differences in gameplay that you see between NCAA and NBA.
Just as the teaser trailer did the screens remind me a lot of NBA Live 09 which shouldn’t be a surprise given the shared engine. One of the specific improvements mentioned is how the gather has been removed from the shot block animations. Given that delay in response is one of the biggest complaints about Live it seems likely to be included in an upcoming patch. In fact probably more than a few of the improvements made to NCAA Basketball will be added to Live so this offers some good insight into that even if you aren’t all that interested in NCAA.