NCAA Football HD

If the Washington State University football team was to have its own game, NCAA Football HD would be it because - like the team's ranking going into the 2010-11 season - it sucks.

This isn't the charming sort of underdog that gets beaten so badly that it's perversely fun to watch, but more along the lines of mediocrity so underwhelming that you just want to walk away.

NCAA Football HD captures that boring, almost incompetent sportsmanship to the last letter. Broken controls, a limited selection of teams, pathetic audio, and an underwhelming slate of modes put NCAA Football HD at the bottom of the pile.

How the game got here is a surprise. Given the inheritance left by last year's enjoyable Madden NFL 10, NCAA Football HD ought to have had an easy time delivering decent college ball.

Yet here's a game that manages to squander much of that good work. All of the features from the former are intact, though broken or misaligned in some way. The execution - not the strategy - is to blame.

It begins with the controls: they're dysfunctional. Players routinely fail to act in accordance with your manipulations of the virtual analogue stick. Slide it to the left and your guy keeps running forward. This appears to be worse when playing defence, though it's a problem when in possession of the ball too.

Quite frankly, such dysfunctional controls render any other criticism null. Does it matter what modes or teams NCAA Football HD offers if the basic gameplay is so incompetent as to not respond to your input? Still, it's worth noting where NCAA Football HD fails in the hopes that next year's outing (if there shall be one) doesn't make the same errors.

For example, the inclusion of 55 teams sounds great until you realise that there's actually 119 NCAA teams. EA hasn't offered even half of the available teams. The only explanation I can suggest is the desire to keep the file size to a minimum. To be fair, the game does have a Team Editor in which you can recreate your favourite team.

There's not much to do with a custom team aside from taking it through Season mode. NCAA Football HD skimps on modes, with just Quick Play and Season available for solo play and head-to-head Bluetooth match filling the multiplayer quota.

If not online wi-fi multiplayer, then some sort of multi-season Dynasty mode (as in the console version) or a BCS playoff series would give the game some longevity.

Perhaps the most ridiculous flaw comes from the audio design. One common error has multiple college fight songs playing simultaneously, overlapping for the most cacophonous rally ever heard. The announcing is equally as grating with phrases repeated to such a degree that it's not uncommon to hear the same statement made twice in immediate succession.

You can't have everything in a cheap portable game, and so it's understandable that there isn't a ton of modes and features. But NCAA Football HD can't even meet baseline expectations.