Bowl Bound College Football

I have had this game for several years, and have spent countless hours on it. This is a text based sports sim, and the best one out there on college football. Basically you run a D1 football program. You are in charge of recruiting, the budget, hiring and firing coordinators and you can call plays during the games if you would like to. The game even gives you some latitude on scheduling and player training. If you are looking for an arcade game this is not for you, but if you like deep text based sports sim, this would be a good one for you to check out.

I'm a huge CFB so I was thrilled when I came across this game, but, despite making every effort to love the game, I just don't. The main issue for me is the instability; the game crashes at least a couple of times in each session (which, tbf, is normally 3+ hours) and sometimes even deletes your saved game for no apparent reason. As you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating. The UI isn't always particularly user-friendly either; I spend most of my time during the recruiting section of the game flicking back and forth between my (in-game) emails and the recruiting screen to follow advice which is in said emails, making an otherwise enjoyable aspect of the game tedious and grindy. Simply populating the player info screen with suggested recruit pitches after scouting, rather than slowly growing adding to them week on week, would be a quick fix here. Similarly, full information on player injuries isn't available in your depth chart, so you have to flick back and forth between emails and depth chart to update the position of players who are fit to play but haven't fully recovered. If you could get the medical staff report either in the player info screen or simply by hovering over their name in the depth chart I would save a fair bit of time. There's more on this but I won't drone on. Finally, calling the plays in a game can be very hollow and frustrating at times, not because this is a text-based sim, but because there is no kind of play-by-play feedback or general analysis to explain why a certain play is/isn't working, making play-calling fairly arbitary as long as you stay within the confines of common sense. A simple pop-up from the relevant co-ordinator explaining in more detail what happened on each play would help give a clearer picture of why a play succeeded/failed and help to make more informed decisions later on. There are things I do love about the game, like the subject matter and the fact that it even exists. I've had some really enjoyable moments when playing and there's a real sense of satisfaction from building your team's prestige and attracting better recruits as the seasons wear on. Unfortunately that just isn't enough to keep me coming back for more agonising crashes and motonous offfseason tabbing. While it would be foolish to expect the kind of polish you would expect from a game like Football Manager, given the difference in budget and price, I would have hoped for a slicker overall product. If the issues I mentioned above are fixed then I will come back to this game in a heartbeat, but until then I'll just content myself with watching CFB.

If you are missing the dynasty aspects of the NCAA series, this is the game for you. While it currently still harbors some techinical problems, it is still a solid game. Pros + In depth stats + Ability to structure custom playbook + Original BCS NC, 4 team, or 16 team playoff options + Academic suspensions + Shifting conferences + Setting of depth chart and CPU in-game strategy Negatives - Basic coaching options - Occasional game crashes - Over-simplfied recruiting The game can be as simple or in depth as you want. You can play an entire season in 20 minutes or several hours. The recruiting is good overall, however it feels a little bland at many times. But offseason activities are far better than any college dynasty game I have seen before. If you enjoyed OOTPB or Football Manager, this will feel a little more shallow as it isn't at that level yet. But it is a solid addition to manager sims and is worth playing if you are a college football fan

Maybe if this game was on sale for 75% off, it'd be worth it.. But it's not worth $20. Very in depth, but it's like the devs focuses so hard on making it in depth, they forgot to make simple game mechanics and smart AI. Example, #4 Ohio State vs. #5 Alabama.. Final score, OSU- 34 ALA-10... OSU moves down to the #5 spot somehow. Next week: a bye for OSU.. Move down to #7 Next week: #7 OSU vs. #14 Wisconsin.. Final score, OSU-50 WIS-21.. OSU moves down to #9. How the ♥♥♥♥ does that happen???????

This is a game that should be great but clearly lacks the TLC of a passionate developer. I'll give the breakdown first for the impatient, then explain in more detail underneath that. Disclaimer: I grabbed this one for ten bucks (50% off) over on Amazon during the first week of December 2015, so that probably affects my judgment somewhat. [h1]PROS[/h1] ---It perfectly captures the feel of my university days spent playing NCAA '09 on my PS2 with two lukewarm 40s of King Cobra on either side and a backup controller for when I smash the one in my hands against my apartment's concrete walls. Except without the trips to Gamestop for new controllers. ---Playcalling during games is easy. The recommended plays also seem to adapt to those that have been effective against the current team, which can lead to big gains. ---It's a college football game on PC...or even a college football game at all, which apparently isn't even a thing any longer. ---The management aspect straddles the line between user-friendly and 6deep9me very well, which allows it to be accessible for everyone while supplying tons of data for those of us who are stats ♥♥♥♥♥♥. (I mean, I used to keep a notepad file of my completed seasons in NCAA '09. How obsessive is that? Here you can export things to Excel spreadsheets extremely easily.) ---The game trusts you to be an adult; there is a player and coach editor built in that allows you to do whatever you want to the stats. Sadly, it doesn't allow changes to appearance. Playing with linemen who look like yetis never felt better. On the flip side, adding your favorite IRL player is easy, as long as you don't mind him looking like an anthropomorphic ♥♥♥♥. ---Installing the mod for real teams takes about five seconds, [h1]NEUTRAL[/h1] ---Besides the real teams mod, user support for the game is nonexistent. It looks like there might have been mod support five or ten years ago, but certainly not any more. ---No sound effects, music, or fullscreen. None of that bothered me, as I listen to my own music while playing most games. And the fullscreen wasn't a problem for me; I just kept a chat window open or watched hentai or /wildcrazy or whatever off to the side. [h1]CONS[/h1] ---More drops than Sprint. Seriously, you thought dropped passes were a problem in action football games? This is a whole new level. ---Extremely cheap match engine cheeses you hardcore in the fourth quarter, no matter what the score or how good your players are (more on this below). ---Match engine hangs momentarily after plays. It's not a problem if you only play one game per session, but if you play for several hours at a time, it's incredibly frustrating. ---Award watch list throughout the season is useless. The player who will actually win any given award is never actually on the list, or at least never near the top. Confirmed this through simulating further seasons. What's the point of the list, then? ---Rankings system throughout the season is useless. I was unranked as Western Kentucky until the bowl season, then shot to #2 in the computer and #10 in the main poll after one week (then #1 in the postseason). True to form, I got a worthless matchup against a 6-6 Cincinnati, so at least that's realistic. But all season and even in the final rankings, .500 and even sub-.500 teams were routinely in the top-25, which is obviously ludicrous. Also, in no reality ever would a C-USA team be ranked in the top five, particularly when any other team in the top-25 refuses to schedule a match against me. (As a sub-remark, Brandon Doughty and/or a C-USA QB would never win the Heisman. Sorry.) ---The game is clearly out-of-date. For example, there are still five-yard facemask penalties, the extra points are still from the 2.5 yard line, and there is absolutely no evolution of the spread offense. Running a pass-heavy offense is possible (more below), but trying to role-play it isn't very fun because 80% of your plays are going to be from single back or I-set formations. As a sub-remark, it should be noted that the dev did patch in CFB playoffs. Why he left all the other outdated stuff in is another example of no TLC. ---There are no AI sliders, and exploiting the AI in the first three quarters is easy with a competent quarterback and at least one receiver who graduated to the Verizon School. ---There is also no record-keeping, so when you BTFO an NCAA record, there are no congratulations. I know the game doesn't come with the NCAA license, duh, but I'm sure there was a way to get something like this in there somehow. ---There is hardly anything to do during the season besides play the games. ---The official forums are a laugh. Unless I'm a complete idiot (possible; I did go to a Big Ten school), you can only see threads from the last thirty days. So what if I want to find tips, tricks, or any other information on a ten-year old game? Too bad. And good luck getting any answers from the Steam community, that place is drier than my post-grad sex life. ---I played one entire season without a single crash--16 hours of gameplay. This was pleasing, as many people in the reviews complained about the instability. Then I spent two hours recruiting in the offseason, advanced to the final week, and the game handed me an APPCRASH. Not only that, but opening any other program in Windows supplied me with a strange "out of RAM" error that I've never seen before, even though Task Manager showed I had over seven gigs free. My PC takes about 10-15 minutes to fully recover from a reset (don't I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ know it), so this was a massive rage moment. Two hours lost + the reset time. ---Absurd, entry-level typos/grammatical errors in the play-by-play text and in the game. Most people probably won't notice them, but it's a prime example of the lack of TLC that I mentioned above. (EX: "QB's" instead of "QBs") [h1]CONCLUSION[/h1] Even after all the hate, I'll still give it a reluctant 4/10. I doubt I'll play for hundreds of hours like other people on Steam have, but I've already gotten 18 hours out of it (though two were completely wasted). It's college football, and it's a sports management game. It's not going to compete with FM, but it will occupy you for a few hours. Definitely get it on sale. It's not worth twenty, it's barely worth ten unless you're a sports management nut or are really looking for some football on the PC. $7.50 or under is the sweet spot. [h1]MOAR[/h1] Once the clock strikes midnight on the third quarter, the game engages Maximum Cheddar Mode. In fourteen games, my quarterbacks threw fourteen interceptions. All fourteen came in the fourth quarter. My players lost sixteen fumbles. Twelve came in the fourth quarter. In one game I held the opposing QB to 37 yards passing through three. He ended the game with 411. In the entire season, my team allowed 137 points, good for second in the nation. 105 came in the fourth quarter. I've tried manually subbing players, letting the AI sub players, and leaving my tip-top-tier starters in the whole game. It absolutely does not matter: fourth quarter AI will destroy you with its cheese. In another game, Brandon Doughty was 45-49 for 441 yards with 5 TDs through three. I really wanted to win the Heisman, so I left him in to run up the stats and the score. He finished 47-71 for 470 with 5 TDs and 2 INTs. Yeah, that's fair. Good job, game. Joke's on them, I guess, since he finished the year 510-750 for 6543 yards with 57 TDs and 11 INTs...along with the Heisman and the Davey O'Brien. As I said before: once you figure out how to exploit the AI, it's simple to run up the score [in the first three quarters]. This game desperately needs sliders to adjust the difficulty. Sure, I was playing the C-USA with a good quarterback, but my starting running back shouldn't catch 106 screen passes for 1167 yards out of the shotgun. Maybe if this was online Madden on the Xbox against a 12-year old that would work, but not in a supposedly-realistic simulator.

Randomly freezes or crashes on a regular basis (like hourly) which require a restart (of the computer - not the game). The crashes actually screw up your computer, interfering with functions like copy&paste, which is pretty unheard of and hints at how badly it is coded. There are some things to like, but ultimately there are far too many problems in multiple areas to recommend, including severe stability issues and an atrocious interface. The game has been around for a while, so there's probably not much chance of significant improvement.

When playing through the franchise modes of a modern sport game like NBA 2K or, to a lesser extent, Madden, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when the only place you could find the multi-season GM-like experience of these titles was the world of text simulations. The trade-off with these text sims was that they there were usually a one-man operation, with 99% of the time and effort spent trying to replicate accurate stats and finances of the sports they were simulating, and the remaining 1% spent quickly hobbling together a GUI to present all the information. Bowl Bound College Football was one of the first among the new breed of text sims. By moving away from the ‘one-man operation’ model to employ others specialising in areas such as 2D graphics and UIs, BBCF attempted to merge the strengths of text sims – the multi-season experience, and statistical accuracy – with a GUI that also didn’t look like an excel spreadsheet. It succeeded. Despite the fact that the game has been out for some time now, the UI is still clean and modern looking, and little touches like player portraits for the generated players was years ahead of the 3D-based sporting titles. Even the BBCF simulation screen foreshadows the type of display we expect to see today in ‘quicksim’ screens in these 3D titles. Graphics aside though, BBCF alse does the kind a great job simulating the kind o fcollege football experience – recruiting, strategy, statistical accuracy – that you expect from any text sim worth its salt. In any sports game, be it text sim or graphical, my favourite aspect is rebuilding a team into a winner, and the college world of sports is perfect for this given the continual overhaul needed to replace graduated players. Even after all these years – ignore my Steam stats, I’ve had this title on my PC for close to a decade - I fire it up from time-to-time and embark on yet another career. With no other college football game around or even on the horizon, BBCF is a fine option to satisfy your college football hunger. Hopefully one day we see the long-rumoured Pro football version released!

I bought this game with doubts, because I was looking for a deep and modern american football sim especially for college. Unfortunately there are no real alternatives and most of the stuff is text based. Finally I gave it a shot and I am enjoying it. If you are looking for a college based american football managing game, and your imagination is big enough to see your players on the field, then I can recommend it to you. If you are looking for 3D, or even a basic 2D simulation of your plays, then you won't be happy with it. + Playcalling - The rage is real + Playerdevelopement and recruiting + Real schoolnames/conferences/bowl-names as a mod available + New 4 team playoff mode available + Active online leagues - No fullscreen mode - No week to week practicing / Gamepreperations - Rankings are a bit weird. Got a 0-3 team in the top 25 polls.

I've owned this game since 2005 and can't even begin to imagine how many years I've pumped into this game. To those of you giving negative reviews about "any game being released in 2015 should have full window support," please keep in mind this game is actually a decade old, but recently released on Steam. I wish I had the "manual" that comes along with the game now. It really acts more like a cheat sheet and something that will help everyone with the learning curve of the game. I highly recommend this game to anyone who is into text games. Unfortunately for us, the football text market is rather thin, but BBCF will give you many many hours of enjoyment. Yes, there are some bugs which pop up from time to time requiring a shut down and reboot of the computer. However, they are nowhere near what they used to be. Key hint here is to make sure to have at least two different saves going for your world so that if one gets corrupted, you have the back up. All you do is in game options add a 1 to the save file and keep flipping back and forth. Its not a perfect solution, but with the amount of fun this game provides me, I'll deal with the smaller text/windows and crashes every once in awhile. They aren't anywhere near gamebreaking. I hope you take the plunge and give this game a shot! You won't regret it!

First - the 2015 release date on the Store page is when it was released on Steam. The game is actually much, much older. Sure, it had a small udpate where the developer added the college playoff framework, but the when they made that update, they didn't address a number of others, to include technical issues. Now, some folks may not have any issues. Others (you can see in their reviews, forum posts, online searches) experience a crash after playing it for a bit. I'm one of those who seems to get about 2-3 hours of play before it crashes. And by crash I mean freeze, unresponsive with it apparently sucking the life out of the computer so you have to kill it manually. Not the end of the world in some cases, however, some folks when this happens, finds that even after the game is closed, that their operating system begins acting strangely, with odd errors. I'm also one of those, adn the odd errors are things like Windows Explorer failing when I right click on an object, and somethings refusing to launch without a restart of the computer (to include the game itself). I first thought it was a simple memory leak, but my RAM tools tend to show nothing wrong. Even worse, I enjoyed it enough that I figured I'd just deal with restarting my computer every few hours. Now, after the last crash, restarting my computer isn't getting rid of the oddities at all. The only thing that has triggered this behavior is this game. My only guess is it's a game that the method in which it was written, doesn't run well on current computers, although it could have been like this for years, as I've found others, with no solid fixes, who have mentioned the same issue and who've sought and seem to not have found an adequate resolution. So, it's fun if you like simulators. It's not the most accurate, and parts of it are both vague and seemingly broken, but it was really scratching my itch for what I was looking for. I just can't recommend it though, as if you're really jonesing for it, you'll likely buy it anyway, but if you're semi-interested for a time killer - don't do it, as you could be making headaches for your computer. As it is, it has gotten bad enough for me that I've uninstalled it. So, buyer beware if you decide to go for it.