NCAA Final Four for the PS2 is a very fluid and impressive game when you first boot it up. The menu is very easy to read and you are presented with a bevy of options such as being able to start a tournament without going through a whole new season. There are also plenty of teams, I beat Grambling a division 2 team in the tounament. This adds a welcome addition to the game.
The gameplay is nice and moves very well. There is touch shooting in which a bar with a green line in the middle. When you hold down the shoot button the bar fills up. If you stop it at the green then the points are as good as yours. I like this feature, whether it has been done before I do not know, and makes the game a little easier. If there is a drawback to this, it is when you want to dunk the player may opt to take a shot instead.. This hardly happens though and shouldn't be a major deciding factor in the game.
Even with all of this there is something that I feel is missing from the game. Minor annoyances that are in this title do not help either. Every time you pause the game the fight song is played. Very annoying. However the more annoying thing is the time out management of the computer. It calls timeout 30 seconds before the half. When it is down 30 it also decides to call all of their time outs near the end of the game. Why? They already lost. But the worst part is that the cheerleaders come out and do the same ass dance routine to whatever song is playing. They are not even in rythm. Just like the XFL proved, just because you have cheerleaders does not mean it will turn out good.Grant it you can skip it but there is a 5 second buffer before you can skip it. Another annoyance is the #'s one the score ticker are F$#%#@ small! I have to pause the game to check the score. The last thing would be the config. buttons. You can't change them. X is to jump to rebound but it also acts as the shoot button on offense. Some time you may rebound the ball and not even know it because the ball is small, then you will let loose a shot from the other side of the court.
Whoa that paragraph was long. The game is good but is just missing something. The ending sucks, but all sports endings suck,and there are like 5 character faces. I never knew that there could be 2 of the same person on the court at the same time. Still if you love basketball and have a memory card there is no better time to play this game than right now during the 2001 NCAA tournament. Your team already lose? Put them back in and beat the crap of whoever beat them in real life. Anyway if you can swing the dough and like basketball then I reccamend this as a buy. By the way it will be Arizona National Champs.
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