NCAA Football 12 isn’t out for another 10 days, but there’s something you can do in the meantime—with the new version of the game, even—that will add to your experience, and others’ too, when it arrives.
You can create your high school’s uniforms, using TeamBuilder, the web application for NCAA Football now in its third year. The new version supporting NCAA 12 went live on Thursday.
“Road to Glory,” NCAA 12‘s singleplayer career, is expanding to include your created player’s senior season of high school, up to 11 games. The game’s designers, recognising that many users have created their own high schools with TeamBuilder over the past two years, also allow you to import those teams’ uniform designs and other minor details, rather than using generic uniforms and autogenerated team nicknames.
Two years’ worth of created teams mean you’ll usually find at least a couple of options for any high school, without researching team colours or other details and building your own. The problem is, some of them are two years old and many were made with next to zero care. Going through a list of South Stokes High School options, about half of them had generic EA Sports logos on the helmet. That’s just piss poor.
Sure, everyone’s not going to do it. But NCAA has an excellent, highly motivated community that cares a lot about these things. The important thing is, you don’t have to agonize over the team’s roster, its ratings, or playcalling tendencies. In Road to Glory, NCAA Football 12 only imports these details:
• Home jersey (with primary helmet and pants)
• Away jersey (with primary helmet and pants)
• Stadium name, field logo, 20-yard line graphics, and end zone text. (With certain exceptions, all teams will play at one of three generic high school fields in the game).
Working from a single good logo, you could create a respectable uniform set suitable for RTG import in about 30 minutes. If you don’t know what your high school’s threads look like in present day, give it your best shot. Go for a classic look. (This isn’t Elkin High’s actual design, but one based off what I remember as a kid and later as a student there.)
Now, do that, and flag it RTG in the team name (which is fully editable within the game after you import it) and everyone will know this is meant for use in the new high school year of the singleplayer sim.
One note on stadium choice: I think RTG does make use of some high school-sized stadiums, or venues that have hosted state championships. For example, I imported Hibriten High School whose creator, for some reason, put them in Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium (three hours away), and we played the game there. But a college team I created out in Colorado that plays at Invesco Field was situated at the generic high school field.
Further, for fans of the series, the site’s update for NCAA 12 will give you a sneak preview of the rosters. Simply create a blank team and then, in roster management, select any of the existing 120 teams as a template and it will show all of its personnel and their ratings.)
Even if you don’t have the game, TeamBuilder’s a fun timewaster for those who fetishize uniform details. If you don’t even like sports, why should you help? Because I’ll give you a titty-twister in gym class if you don’t.
TeamBuilder [NCAA Football 12]
Leave a Reply