When NCAA Football 09 launched on Wii, I seriously considered picking it up. I buy the game every year, you see, and have since NCAA 2002 in the summer of 2001.  I'm not great at it (I don't bother playing online), but I really enjoy reliving the glory of NCAA gridiron on the home video game consoles. By the time NCAA finally came out on Wii in July 2008, I had already purchased an Xbox 360. In fact, my Xbox 360 purchase was almost made entirely for the sole purpose of being able to play the latest NCAA game when it came out.

Still, I considered picking up the Wii version, until reviews came out, anyways. The game was universally panned, with a Metacritic rating of 49 (the highest contributing review was 57) compared to the 83 on Xbox 360. Critics were unhappy with the game's lack of online play, and smaller feature-set compared not just to it's HD brethren, but compared to Madden on the same platform. The game was deemed lacking, and shortly forgotten. NCAA 10 did not release on the system, and so when looking back on NCAA Wii, we have merely the one game to go on.

NWR never reviewed the game back in 2008, and it seems a bit silly to do so now. What I am planning on doing, instead, is a retrospective of the game by playing one complete season of an NCAA dynasty. As dynasty mode is my favorite part of the series, I will trace my victories and failures through the 2008-09 football season with my cherished Nebraska Cornhuskers, and relate my thoughts on the game as I play.

As NCAA 12 looms nearer to release this July, it's time for Nintendo fans to say "hey, we wanna play too."