Children left on doorsteps. Unwashed men sitting trancelike in front of glowing blue television screens. A woman sobbing uncontrollably in the corner. A scene from Infinite Jest? The Twilight Zone?
No! It's day Zero of NCAA 2006: the Quickening. Flee your homes, carrying only your gaming systems and your televisions, and join us in the new non-worker's utopia, mashing buttons until we achieve a state of perfect, blank, drooling consciousness with 562 yds. passing, 6 tds, 128 yds. rushing, and no picks for the game. But enough about Reggie McNeal playing with the spread option playbook...
Reggie McNeal could goes large in NCAA 2006.
The reviews are starting to trickle in, and are largely positive. IGN.com, the grandaddies of this whole "let's play video games and write about them on the internet thing" (geniuses!), give it a 9.2 for the Box edition, even suggesting you take your copy of 2005 and place it under the leg of your wobbly coffee table since you won't be needing it anymore, along with your credit cards, marriage license, soap, and anything else from your former life. One wonders, though, if Boi From Troy didn't submit the review under the pseudonym "Craig Beridon" when reading this excerpt:
A personal highlight for me would be the detail of ass cheek animation present when a player shifts his weight while sprinting or juking across the field.
That's hot.
Gatorsports shows us some of the more theraputic possibilities of the game, as one of their staffers cranks up the game and wastes no time taking former Gator coach and fraternity outreach coordinator Ron Zook to the woodshed in a 35-7 defeat in the Swamp. (The gamer in us cringes when he lists Chris Leak's outlandish numbers in the game but also mentions throwing 2 picks--watch your safeties pre-snap, man! This is science, dammit!)Blue-Gray Sky admits that it doesn't have a system in the BGS lounge, but take a look at the entry anyway for some hilarious embedded links. Westerdawg test drives the game with the Ol' Ball Coach, who wonders what button puts Danny Wuerffel in, and Ian says we might not see him for a while. More updates pending, though we doubt it, predicting a slide into "Day of the Dead"-esque chaos as the perfect entertainment sucks more and more victims into its sweet orbit.