The latest edition of NCAA Football will release July 14 on four consoles, but none of them are named Wii. The "All-Play" version has been sacked as EA Sports focuses on improving the full-featured title.
In comments to Gamespot, EA Sports confirmed the omission of the Wii from the launch announcement was not a mistake.
"In the interest of providing our consumers with the best possible college football experience, we are currently evaluating our approach to the NCAA Football franchise on the Wii. As such, we will not be releasing an NCAA Football title in 2009 for the Wii."
What's going into that "best possible college football experience?" Not create-a-school. Instead there's something called "Season Showdown." Players will affiliate themselves with a school and earn credits for it by completing challenges either in the game or on the web. The school with the most points, from across the entire EA community, wins top honors. In other words, it's a big online pep rally, and either Florida or some other SEC school will inevitably win the spirit stick.
Season Showdown joins some graphical eye candy as improvements to the game. But unless and until this franchise brings back create-a-school, eliminates campus legend mode and restores at least half of the pre-game and cutscene animations we saw in NCAA '04 and '05, it'll just be a roster update to me. No offense, but this has felt like half the game I used to enjoy, ever since it hit the next generation systems.
The elimination of the Wii version doesn't necessarily disagree with CEO John Riccitello's recent statement that the company increase its focus on games for that platform. EA could be pouring its efforts into other Wii games; All-Play essentially takes all the effort of making a realistic sports simulation and dumbs it down for a console whose players don't seem to want it.
EA Benches Wii NCAA Football [Gamespot]