NCAA Football 2000

In the seventh chapter of his 2017 book ­­Bit by Bit, novelist Andrew Ervin sketches a compelling analogy between the history of video games and that of visual art. He parallels innovations made by Renaissance painters like da Vinci and Michelangelo with advancements made in video game development in the 32-bit era. While visual culture in the Middle Ages was characterized by a flatness of perspective and lack of dimensionality, Renaissance painters introduced depth of field, creating the impression of three dimensions on the canvass. Ervin submits that "one could say that Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, successors to the SNES, accomplished something similar" (104). The PS1 and N64, then, in adding 3-dimensionality to video-gaming through the rotation of thousands of polygons per second, moved video games away from the flat, two dimensional imaginaries of the 8- and 16-bit eras and, in effect, ushered in something of a “renaissance” in their own right. Superficially, this comparison has a sort of intuitive momentum on account of the direct correspondence upon which it is founded: just like the Renaissance, game-designers of the 32/64-bit era added dimension to the visual representations they were creating. Adding dimension, however, does not a Renaissance make; truth be told, the 32- and 64-bit era was hardly a golden age for video games.

A fitting case in point is NCAA Football 2000. Among the most prominent selling points of the fin-du-millénaire edition of EA's popular college football franchise were its graphics. While its precursor NCAA 99 was the first in the series to feature three-dimensional polygonal graphics, NCAA 2000 updated the player models such that they came in varying sizes, and could be fully displayed in an array of camera angles during gameplay. Accordingly, wide receivers are lean and wiry, while linemen are Bunyanesque hosses. To the sports gamer of 1999, the year in which NCAA 2000 was released, this would have looked quite alluring. To the contemporary eye, however, NCAA 2000's graphics are abominable. Even when assuming the forgiving attitude the old-school gamer typically affords graphics from previous eras, NCAA 2000 is still an eye-sore. Especially problematic are those full-figured linemen, all of whom look like bloated quadrangular blobs. Of course, after the snap, it is nigh impossible to distinguish the bigger blobs from the littler ones, and play proceeds mostly in pixelated clumps. Animations, when discernible, are rigid and attenuated, and the gameplay is much the same, suffering from a damning combination of floaty movement and yet stiff articulation of actions. The game’s motion-captured sequences look passable in screen shots, but in-game they imbue the players with a jittery, cretinous manner of ambulation, a somewhat jarring break from their otherwise wooden movement patterns. In short, NCAA 2000 might have been better appreciated as a painting...in the Middle Ages. At present, NCAA looks and plays no more pleasingly than those vibrating motorized electric football games that were in currency (I hesitate to say "popular") in the 1960s and 70s.

Playing NCAA 2000, then, is to hearken back even further than the end of the 90s, to a time before video games, and potentially even a time before electricity. Seeing the abstract, undifferentiated masses wrought by these developers eager to make forays into polygonal graphics, one has scant convincing evidence for characterizing the PS1/N64 epoch as a "renaissance" of video gaming. Playing NCAA Football 2000, one wonders if the 32- and 64-bit era isn't more accurately described as a Dark Age.

NCAA Football 2000 is not without its bright spots, however, especially when it comes to bells and whistles. The game includes, for instance, a "Create-a-School" mode, which delivers as advertised, allowing you to pick the logo, stadium and even enrollment numbers for a cow college-cum-contender. Also, NCAA 2000 features a thoughtful "Great Games" mode in which the player can jump straight into bowl games of bygone eras, among other classics, such as the 1946 "Game of the Century" between Notre Dame and Army, which ended in a thrilling 0-0 tie.

As bowl season swings around, one might see NCAA 2000 among the cheap PS1 refuse in their local game store and get tempted to purchase it, revisiting the game as they would revisit classic bowl games of the past. Isn't there, after all, an ineffable appeal in a dizzying plurality of over-hyped perfunctory one-off playoff games for arbitrary championships named for foodstuffs and B-grade corporate entities? For even the most acute sufferer of bowl mania, however, NCAA 2000 is not the prescription. Although NCAA 2000 may have serviced a yearning among contemporaneous college-football fans, it is anything but timeless. Quite unlike a good piece of art, NCAA 2000 does not stand the test of time, not only against present-day college football fare, but even compared to college football games released a couple years later (such as NCAA 2002 for PS2). Its concomitant competitor on PS1, NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 by 989 Sports, though not a great game in itself, has actually aged better, largely on account of the fact that the developers weren't so overambitious with their player models. So while NCAA Football 2000's developers and many, many others in the 32-/64-bit era attempted a dimensional innovation not unlike that of Renaissance painters, the comparison falters when we consider outcomes. Da Vinci and other Renaissance artists did the additional dimension well. It wouldn’t be until the PS2/X-Box/GameCube era that three dimensions worked with consistent efficacy in video games. Like so many other games released for PS1 and N64, NCAA 2000 attempts to expand dimensionality, but it does so at the expense of coherence.