Ever since I heard it was possible, I have been fascinated by the idea of using the Campus Legend and Superstar features of NCAA Football and Madden NFL to take a player through his entire career, from College to (hopefully) the NFL Hall of Fame. Until now I have been foiled in this attempt by the difficulty of getting a copy of NCAA football in Australia as it was only released on DVD based consoles like the 360 and PS2 and never in Region 4. Now however, with the zone-free blu-ray of the PS3 and a little bit of importing it is possible to finally tell the story of Moose McFadden of Wasilla, Alaska.
Just before I start this I should make a couple of points. While I have been an NFL fan since I was little, College football is something I am not particularly familiar with. I’ve read enough coverage of it to “get it”, I know how more or less what the Bowl system is, what the Heisman is, and which colleges are perennially up there, but when it comes to individual players and systems I am completely useless. That doesn’t matter quite so much in this particular game anyway as it will be played with randomised player names. I don’t think it is possible to use my downloaded accurate rosters for Campus Legend mode. Since Moose will play 2008-2011 in NCAA and then get drafted into the 2008 NFL season it made no sense to bust a gut getting real player names anyway. So with all of that said, lets get “in the game”.
We join our strapping red-headed protagonist after the character creation screen of the NCAA Campus Legend feature. In his senior year at noted drop-out factory Wasilla High School (Go Warriors!) Quarterback Moose McFadden is attempting to drag his team kicking and screaming to the Alaskan School Activities Association state championships. For anyone familiar with American football out there, Moose has a touch of Vince Young about him, all wrapped in a big 240 lb lumberjacky exterior, for everyone else he’s like Joey Johns crossed with a freight train.
His team is terrible, but Moose looms like a bowling ball at a pin convention and gleefully flattens anyone who gets in his way. To mix things up, he occasionally throws the ball too, 60 yard bombs to wide-open receivers. But that’s mainly because he knows that the scouts are in town and he needs to show off a bit if he’s going to get Wasilla High a college scholarship this year. Every game ends with a list of top schools that have made the long trip north to watch him play.
So many scouts turn up to watch Moose in fact that for some bizarre reason the final game is moved from the traditional Anchorage Football Stadium to the stadium at the University of Washington (home of the Huskies). Following yet another blow-out, this time over some useless Anchorage high school, Moose is declared the Alaskan Football Player of the Year and settles into a long wait to see whose cheerleaders he’ll get to impregnate (Wasilla High only teaches abstinence, and Moose was abstaining from school that day). He receives a number of offers from renowned football schools like Texas, Oklahoma and Michigan but ultimately settles on Louisiana State University (LSU). The reigning National and South Eastern Conference (SEC) champions, the LSU Tigers have just graduated their old starting quarterback and are keen to offer Moose a chance to take the reins in his first season. The LSU system should suit Moose well heading into his NFL career. Only a couple of years earlier then LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell, who like Moose was a big lad with a cannon for an arm and quick feet excelled enough to earn himself a $68 million contract as the number one overall draft pick. There’s also the added bonus of their home stadium, known as Death Valley, which according to NCAA Football 09 is the toughest place to play football. Apparently it once registered an explosion of noise that was registered on the Geology Department’s seismograph. Moose can’t really see what all the fuss is, the bayou is a world away from the toughness required for away games in Barrow, Alaska.
Now in Baton Rouge there’s little time for young Moose to get settled. Every day starts with practice – to save time Moose can sim through this since he already has the starter’s spot, but for the first week or so we play it anyway to get used to the playbook and which players on his offence are good value. In the evenings there is a choice between going to the library (a fairly foreign experience for a boy from Wasilla High), going to the gym, reading his playbook and going to the trainer. Apparently cheerleaders aren’t an option for “evening activities” in NCAA, maybe it’ll get unlocked after he wins the Heisman. In the meantime, new to the program, he decides to stay indoors with the playbook for the first couple of weeks (besides, it’s hot out there in Baton Rouge) and his grades suffer. Apparently he needs to keep a 2.0 Grade Point Average (GPA) to keep playing football, so after a while the coach convinces him that he needs to mix in the occasional trip to the library. Each option provides a random increase on attributes for the next game, generally at the expense of GPA (with the exception of going to the library which raises the GPA and sometimes some game awareness as well, not sure how this happens, is he throwing the books or reading them?).
Finally, after what felt like 20 minutes of distractions and practice, Moose is ready for his first game of Division I NCAA football.
The story of Moose McFadden will continue in the next post. In the mean time, it is apparently an LSU tradition to “frenchify” the names of prominent players and coaches of the football team. For example, coach Nick Saban became Nick C’est Bon, any ideas on what they would do with Moose McFadden?
This story is awesome, please continue it.
[…] For those just joining us, this is a continuation of a series that starts back here. […]