Same old franchise, brand new year, NCAA Football 10 does little to reinvent its basic tenets of college football videogames - how could it? - but does offer the expected tweaks and gameplay mode variants.

New is a Season Showdown mode where you pick and play as your favorite school, earning it points throughout the season. School with the most points wins. Oddly, the first school you choose is the only school you'll ever get to use for Showdown for as long as you continue to play (which is like, a year, after which you're expected to upgrade to NCAA Football 11).

Anyway, points are earned in three categories: Skills, Sportsmanship and Strategy.

Skills points are pretty straight forward; two for tackles, four for tackles for a loss, eight for a sack, three for a touchdown pass, etc.

You'll earn Sportsmanship points – easily – by kicking on 4th down, taking a knee to run out the clock, not throwing when you have a big lead and not running up the score.

Then there's Strategy points, earned using a gameplay mechanic whereby redundant plays are noted and anticipated. For example, if you like calling a certain run often, the defense will start to set themselves around that play. As you continue to run the ball, you'll see a percentage above the corresponding pass play rise, eventually to 100%. Once there, you can opt for a play-action pass; a play that looks like the running play you've been calling but is actually a pass, catching the defense off guard. Get a first down or a touchdown with that little bit of trickery and you'll net eight Strategy points.

Another new and rather cool feature for NCAA Football 10 is the TeamBuilder mode where you create your own school team, its logo, uniforms, and home stadium as well as all the players, their names, and their attributes. You can post and share up to twelve of these home-brew schools online, allowing others to download them for use in the ubiquitous Dynasty modes.

Those interested in creating a 65-team dream tournament should note that EA will charge you real money for more any more than twelve teams, like tribute, because it's not enough that they'll bilk you for $60 ($70 in Canada) for a game doomed to obsolescence in a year. It's what EA does. You will pay and you will like it, because EA also holds the sole license to the NCAA and there are no other college football videogames out there.

Basically, EA Sports has cornered the market on unlicensed, no-name, no-cost, user-created content of football games, too. Nice of EA to give you the tools to give them more money.

Anyway...

New to NCAA Football 10 in name only is the Road to Glory mode, which is the old Campus Legend mode of previous iterations with a new name and look. Regardless, Campus Road to Legend Glory remains a likable feature where you create a custom player and then play him through his high school state playoffs in his senior year, then choose his college. Genuinely "new" to this old mode is the inclusion of ESPN's ultra attractive (and ultra popular, not coincidentally) sideline reporter Erin Andrews, who will discuss how your career is going and show some of your in-game highlights.

Sporting new mascot animations (which can be somewhat amusing) and some freshly minted hackneyed replay glitches, NCAA Football 10 otherwise looks exactly the same as last year's '09 version; same running and tackling animations, same unsightly crowds, the works.

However, seeing as there's some legitimately likeable new-fangled play in Season Showdown and the nickel & diming a baker's dozen of TeamBuilder mode, NCAA Football 10 brings just enough new stuff to the table to make this version worth getting, even if you have the noticeably similar '09 version.