Jason Romine – Google

TL;DR - This game is booty cheeks. The greatest disappointment of my video game-playing life was the discontinuation of the EA Sports College Football franchise after the 2014 edition. I've been waiting for YEARS for them to revive this game, and practically counting the days for the past couple years to when it was scheduled to return in the summer of 2024. Now that the time is here, and I have the 2025 edition, it appears I'll have to wait forever to ever see anything approaching the greatness of the old College Football franchise. CFB 25 is a bare-bones offering with bad AI and blocky, stiff-looking graphics. The fans in the seats lose their minds with grief when the opposing team kicks a field goal to cut ever-so-slightly into my 4 TD lead. In the rare occasion where I am behind, the AI will start running the ball while clinging precariously to a one-score lead with a TON of time left on the clock. I burn through my timeouts, stop them on three consecutive weak runs that go nowhere, then get the ball back with an ETERNITY to drive and score with ease (on All-American difficulty). The thing is, I would happily forgive ALL of these criticisms if the game offered a very basic feature that just about every sports game (including NCAA Football in the past) has offered for the past 25+ years: player creator. Maybe I'm weird or old, or both, but I've always thought that the desire to have "real" rosters in a college football game was stupid. If you play through 4 or 5 seasons, every "real" player in the game is long gone anyway, so why bother? ESPECIALLY in 2024, with the dystopian capitalist hellscape known as the transfer portal, it's virtually impossible to keep accurate rosters in franchise mode, so again, why bother with "real" rosters? And by the way, no matter how much they prop up online features (to push micro-transactions), offline franchise mode remains the most popular way to play any sports game. Most people that play online ALSO play offline, and then there are consumers like me, who play exclusively offline. If I want to make the University of North Texas (my alma mater) into a powerhouse team with every player named "Fartbag Gonzalez" and make them rated 99 in every ability category, why shouldn't I be able to? It's *MY* OFFLINE franchise. No harm is done to anyone. I paid for the game. I should be able to play however I want. The NIL players still get my money regardless of how I edit them in my OFFLINE franchise. Why should I have to suffer through a grossly unfair real life NCAA that stacks the deck against mid-major programs, AND suffer virtually on a video game? That defeats the very escapism that video games provide. To be clear, I'm not necessarily asking to be able to delete any player currently in the game. I'm asking to be able to add fictional players that I create to the game. EA is famous for taking away basic features, only to add them back in a few years later and market it like they just invented fire, so I'm holding out hope that in some future iteration they'll unveil player creator like it's not something that's existed for nearly three decades. But you got my $70 this time, EA Sports. Good on you. It won't happen again for a very long time. Back to toggling back and forth between The Show 24 and Elden Ring. /:

They had 11 years to get this game right, but instead, they finally released the answer to a question that no one asked. Here's what would make this game darn near perfect (NONE of the following is currently in the game, which is WILD): - All the same swimming, diving, shipboarding, land exploration, melee combat (i.e. swords, pikes, axes, tomahawks) and gunfighting that can be found in Black Flag and (with the obvious exception of gunfighting) Odyssey. - This is a game about Pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy. Fun fact: Pirates almost never sunk opp vessels, and, in the grand scheme of things, actually killed very few people. This game should give players an option to pull up to merchant ships and allow the opp vessels the option to surrender peacefully. Then, the pirates take what they want of the merchant ship's cargo and crew (more on that in a minute), and be on their way. The pirates could even take their ship if they want (as a way to upgrade vessels), but they have to trade their own vessel to the merchant. This wouldn't be a free ticket to upgrade willy-nilly. If the merchant vessel is that much better than the pirate ship, they wouldn't agree to surrender in the first place. Instead, they'd opt to fight it out with the pirates (just like real life). Also, the ability to add certain crewmembers to upgrade various aspects of your ship. A shipwright enables your ship to heal, a doctor enables your human character to heal after a battle, a blacksmith could upgrade your guns, a cartographer could help you map areas you haven't physically gone to yet, etc. - They need to eventually make more playable theaters, like the Spanish Main in the Caribbean (Bahamas to South America as well as the Gulf of Mexico), and the Mediterranean (Southern Europe and the Barbary Coast of North Africa). If these things were added, I think it could be a fantastic game, and easily the best live service game in existence.

This is an absolutely genius adaptation. It's set roughly 30 years after the events of the original comic book series, and it is definitely true to the history of those events, even more so than the 2009 movie. Because of that, the one drawback that I can see for this show is that it would probably be VERY strange and confusing to the casual viewer with no knowledge of the show's canon. There, however, many articles out there to get you up to speed (more or less), so that shouldn't be too much of a problem...I hope.