''NCAA Football 2005'' is an American college football

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

which was released by

EA Sports EA Sports is a division of Electronic Arts that develops and publishes sports video games. Formerly a marketing gimmick of Electronic Arts, in which they tried to imitate real-life sports networks by calling themselves the "EA Sports Network ...

on July 15, 2004. It is the successor to ''

NCAA Football 2004 ''NCAA Football 2004'' is an American football video game released in 2003 by Tiburon. It is the successor to NCAA Football 2003 in the NCAA Football series. The player on the cover is former USC quarterback Carson Palmer. The game is available f ...

'' in the

NCAA Football series ''NCAA Football'' is an American football video game series developed by EA Sports in which players control and compete against current Division I FBS college teams. It served as a college football counterpart to the ''Madden NFL'' series. The se ...

. The game features former

Pittsburgh Panthers The Pittsburgh Panthers, commonly also referred to as the Pitt Panthers, are the athletic teams representing the University of Pittsburgh, although the term is colloquially used to refer to other aspects of the university such as alumni, facu ...

wide receiver

Larry Fitzgerald Larry Darnell Fitzgerald Jr. (born August 31, 1983) is a former American football wide receiver. Fitzgerald played in the National Football League for 17 seasons with the Arizona Cardinals. He played college football at University of Pittsburg ...

on the cover. This would be the final game in the NCAA Football series to be released for the GameCube.

Gameplay

The main focus of ''NCAA Football 2005'' is

home-field advantage In team sports, the term home advantage – also called home ground, home field, home-field advantage, home court, home-court advantage, defender's advantage or home-ice advantage – describes the benefit that the home team is said to g ...

. While playing at home is an advantage in any sport, amateur or professional (especially in the playoffs), some say the concept of home-field advantage matters most in college football. Hence, the major addition to the 2005 game is the "Top 25 Toughest Places to Play," compiled by EA Sports. These rankings are based on home winning percentage, average attendance, and "atmosphere" (i.e., fan rowdiness and noise). Players with the home field advantage on defense can increase the crowd's volume before the snap by repeatedly pressing a certain button on the controller, depending on the system. Likewise, the player with the home field advantage on offense can quiet the crowd with one press of the same button. Crowd noise may affect the quarterback's ability to get an audible across to his other players. If the noise is sufficient, when the quarterback tries to call an audible, one of his teammates will come down to him and gesture that he can't understand him.

Reception

The game was met with very positive reception upon release. GameRankings and

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

gave it a score of 89.45% and 88 out of 100 for the PlayStation 2 version; 88.40% and 89 out of 100 for the Xbox version; and 88.01% and 88 out of 100 for the GameCube version.

References

External links

* 2004 video games College football video games Electronic Arts games GameCube games PlayStation 2 games Xbox games EA Sports games North America-exclusive video games Multiplayer and single-player video games NCAA video games Video games developed in the United States {{Amfoot-videogame-stub