ok good suggestion - we'll see if we can work that in somehow.

As for the improvements so far everything we've heard has been that the game is far deeper in recruiting yet surprisingly not time consuming and definitely less tedious than TCB. I think we really did a good job adding value and at the same time took away the things that really made recruiting a chore sometimes. Our beta forums are open to the public so you might want to read some of the reactions posted in there and if you want to be able to test drive it yourself without putting the money down now definitely just keep tabs on it and wait for the official demo which will be available around release time.

I have created a real NCAA mod already with real team and conference names, two styles of team logos and conference logos. I'll keep updating it with my own and other mod makers tuff.

http://www.wolverinestudios.com/foru...ead.php?t=3614

Awesome man! Thanks.

We're happy to announce that we're about ready to wrap up our open beta testing period and officially release version 1.0 - this is scheduled for Tuesday, December 18th. In the meantime if you are on the fence here's a couple of videos to keep you entertained and looking forward to our game.

Also I've left the pre-order price in the webstore. Once we put up v1.0 it will change back and I was going to actually cut off the pre-orders now but there's been many people here who have shown their support for my work and games over the years so until 1.0 is actually live and on the site I'll leave it in the store with the 15% discount for you guys :)

Coach Lineage
http://www.wolverinestudios.com/down.../llineage.html
Track the entire coaching “family tree” of every coach in the history of your league. See which coaches have been the most successful in teaching their assistants what it takes to make it on their own.

Player Recruiting
http://www.wolverinestudios.com/down...ing%20vid.html
Our already deep recruiting system just got better! Check out the new pitch and focus areas, the ability to call up recruits and converse with them and gather the info you need to determine if he’s the right fit for your school. Check out the massive amount of detail on each recruit – even down to info on his parents who could play a role in his decision making.

Almanac
http://www.wolverinestudios.com/down...c/almanac.html
Check out the detail of the history stored for your league. Go back and look up past award winners, pre and post season tournament winners, team, coach and player records and historical standings for each and every season you’ve played!

In Game Experience
http://www.wolverinestudios.com/down...me/ingame.html
We’ve redesigned our gameplay screen to provide you with much more on court 2D action and our new player icons make it even easier to determine on court matchups and visualize the game. Take a look at the wide array of coaching options you have at your fingertips including the ability to choose different motivation tactics to try and fire up a listless team or heap praise on your boys for a job well done.

I must say that having pre-ordered and been a fairly active and critical beta tester this is a good game. I f anyone is a basketball fan they definitely should pick it up. I really can't say enough about how open to suggestions gary has been during the beat process and it is obvious he has tried to accomodate even suggestions from individuals alone if they were worthy suggestions that is.
The game is very solid and the "too much clicking or having to go four screens down and back to do one thing has been greatly eliminated and the UI is much more streamlined. Also, I would say that this is the only sports text sim other than SI's Football Manager and the now defunct hockey game they had that really get's immersive and caring about things. That is at least compared to the greater body of sports text sims.

Totally agree with Galaril, i'm really impressed both with the game quallity and with Gary's openness regarding new features and suggestions. I think this open beta idea has worked really well, the game is really polished and shouldn't be any important bug in the final release. I love how he has implemented players personalities, still not at the level of FM but getting pretty close, that is something really new for a college sim and that makes you really feel like a college coach. This is going to be one of the games of the year imho as FBCB was in the past.

So umm, i'm kinda curious.. is there a bubble watch and a tourney selection show? :)

yes to both

Bump, the game will be released today evening EST time. I have released already an All-in-One NCAA installer with logos, courts, real teams nicknames, conferences etc etc.

Icy, you da man!

Game is out!


Here is the info about the all in one NCAA installer:
http://www.wolverinestudios.com/foru...ead.php?t=3614

Icy rocks. And I need to try the demo for this game.

Going to try and have the demo out this weekend for anyone interested

Congrats, Gary.

Seeing as how I might be the biggest TCB Homer on this board, I went ahead and pre-ordered a few days ago. I probably won't get a chance to play until after Xmas, but I am looking forward to taking it for a spin.

Thanks, Icy, for the mod--seriously, you should get a medal or something.

Does an admin want to change this to the "Alright Boyz, here we go! DDSCB First Impressions Thread"?

I would but I don't believe I can edit my own thread titles.

As it is, don't wait for the demo. I barely follow any basketball and really only watch the college game during March Madness, but have played many college hoops sims and must say that this is one of the best sports sim games period.

Me has been having fun since two weeks ago when I pre ordered and helped out(not really) with the Beta Testing.

Congrats on the release Gary!

Congrats Gary. Been looking for this for a while.

Also for anyone who didn't read my thread at Wolverine about the game I've decided I really like the open beta approach and am taking the same kind of approach to the game post-release. Rather than fixing/adding things, internally testing and then releasing large updates I'm just going to put out mini-updates as I complete them as beta updates. So shortly there will be a 1.01, 1.02 etc until those new fixes or additions have been tested and we officially call it 1.1

Additional features from our suggestions forums during beta testing have been compiled and are in the plans to be added in as we go to make the game even deeper than it is now as well.

For the FBCB fans out there, is this the game to take it's place? I liked TCB, but always found myself going back to FBCB. It was just a better game for me.

Edit: Gary, has the special ended, both the discount on this game and the package with this and the pro game? Also, is there a discount for owners of TPB to move up to DDS: Pro?

If I remember correctly, try double-clicking on your thread instead of single-clicking it to open it up. Double-clicking the thread title should allow you to change it.

Of course I'm going to be biased here but I think this game really takes what was good in TCB and brings it to the next level. I added a lot to the recruiting aspect of the game while not increasing the "work" to recruit and while reducing the number of clicks it took to do it. There's all kinds of media info - headlines, magazine stories and I really tried to move it in that FM/CM direction by adding the ability to interact with your players and have the players interact with each other as well making you manage personalities rather than just numbers on a screen. Plus the enhanced features like the full coach lineage feature that tracks coaching trees from every coach, the ability to look up any player that ever played for any team, the full screen 2D with icons of different sizes to show height/weight matchups and all of the historical tracking info that just lets you get lost in the game. As good as I felt TCB was - this is just a whole new level.

The pre-order deal has ended now that we released the game but we still have the bundle on the pro and college game in our webstore.

Ok, thanks Gary. I'm definitely going to pick this up, and the pro game as well.

I hate you and your bundled goodness!!!*







*sarcasm*

btw if anyone is looking for a run down on some new things to the game go here

http://www.wolverinestudios.com/

we've got a special DDS:CB intro page there with all kinds of screens and the videos to check out

If I can figure out how to get Paypal to pay without a CC assigned (have some money in the account), I'll buy this today. If I could've figured it out last week, I would've bought it then.

I'm looking forward to trying the demo. Is it a demo where i can play 1 season, or the type that is only active for 3 real life days?

I noticed that the price is up to $40.00 for this game. That makes it the highest priced text based simmulation in the business.

WWSM, OOTP 8, WMMA, FOF 2k7 and even your pro game is cheaper.

Any reason this one costs more?

The demo is going to be limited to a partial season but will not expire. We had some issues with the 3 day full trial that we didn't expect and/or like so we're just going back to the old method of creating a separate demo that you can upgrade from by downloading another update.

The price is $39.95 now (and that's one reason we did the month and a half long pre-order with 15% off so it would work out to be even cheaper than it used to be at release) and really the reason it is priced at that point is because I think the game is worth it. My titles typically have new versions every two years and I continue to update them over that time as well. For instance right before the start of the NBA season I did a pro update with new rosters and a couple new items - the game was released last season so I tried to make it fresh again for the new NBA season. On top of that it's a hell of a game - the best I've done I feel. I think anyone who really gives it a shot and gets into it and pokes around at all the detail will be totally immersed and you will definitely get your money's worth out of the game. But don't take my word for it - we'll get the demo up ASAP to try out for yourself and we should have reviews coming in the not too distant future as well.

fair enough

Gary where can i find the Pro/College bundle option?

When you go into the webstore and order it will be the second screen that will give you the bundle buy or not option.

Although I'm not in the market for the game at the moment, I just wanted to say that I think it's beyond cool that you do this installer.

Will pick this one up sometime in the near future, congratulations Gary!!

Nice work as usual Icy!

I just want to second this - I know some people like playing in a totally fictious universe but lots of people want the real schools and courts and logos and all that and being able to get all of this by downloading one thing has to have a positive impact on the sales of the game and I can't express enough how much I appreciate that. These games are nothing without the support of the community - I only hope that one day I have the following that guys like Markus and Jim have and things like Icy's installer definitely play a role in getting there because when one or two people get involved from the community it tends to make others want to get involved as well.

I have become atotal homer on this game thru the beta process and can't say enough of how fun it is. I took an Air Force team all the way to the finals riding a wave of upsets thanks to some really great three point shooting. It really reminded me of the George Mason team a few years ago or the Jim V Nc ST. that upset the Houston Cougars back in 84 in real life. This game has really got animmersive feel and I have found myself saying up way to late. On egreat thing I have got where I can go thru a pretty complete and throrough recruiting preseason with camps and practice and even sim about a dozen games all afew afew hours. So it is much quicker than it use to be to go through recruiting now.

Thanks Gary, I really appreciate your comments.

Gary or someone else is there some special price in buying the College game and the Pro game together? Gary had mentioned a bundle and i wasn't sure if that meant that if you buy both then you get a special price.

Yeah if you go to the webstore and pick one to buy you are then prompted with an option to buy the 2nd one for the bundled price

Ah perfect. Thanks Gary. You might want to put that somewhere easier to find on the site. It might prompt those people who have been looking at the pro game to move forward if they know that there is a bundled package.

This one was a no brainer for me... I have bought pretty much everything that Gary puts out, since it is all very high quality stuff.

I did a bonehead thing with regards to Vista ... played the game for the past two days, saving it a couple of times. I think I had played about 3 hours, got through the early recruiting and maybe 5-10 games into the season. Then I reboot my computer and go to reload, and nothing. My saves never took place. I checked and I wasn't running the game as an administrator, therefore it wasn't allowing me to save into the Program Files directory. So I had to start my league over again. No problems after making this change. A lot of the latest text games have been putting the save directories in the My Documents folders to prevent this from being a problem, but it is an easy fix to avoid it either way.

I also find that the first bit of the league is a bit of a drag, as there's several rounds of recruiting before any of the games start. I personally would like to get to the action and get to know my players a bit before getting into the hardcore recruiting, but again, that's maybe an hour of the game experience before everything gets rolling so it's not a big deal.

Overall, I love the game so far from my beta experience. I like that I saw my SF with 6 rebounds, 4 offensive rebounds within the first 10 minutes of the game, and looking at the court, he is matched up against a 5'5" player so the guy just can't compete in the air. Being able to SEE this is amazing. Text sims always have a lot of strategy in them, but sometimes it is too abstract. When you can actually see mismatches and can formulate your strategies accordingly, that makes a recipe for a great game.

One alternative here would be to turn it over to the AI(recruiting that is), and start when practice does, if you can stomach that.

Thanks for your kind comments about the game.

C'mon FOFC, more impressions!!!

Seems like a huge upgrade from TCB. I havent played as much as Id like because I am waiting on the first patch to fix things like too many tall players and other things that I wont want in my "serious" career. I can tell you that this game came out less buggy than the pro basketball game still is.

If they are anything like me, they are trying to digest it all. Certainly not a bad thing though. I am just getting started on my coaching career. I really like the new player cards. All the information is right in front of you as opposed to having to make multiple clicks on one card. Recruiting is much more in depth. I like the head coaching call option. I will post more as I go along.

gonna hafta pick this one up for sure

Me too DT and keep those impressions coming!!!

Too busy right now to get into it, but as college football comes to a close, I'm starting to itch for some college basketball.

*sigh* I go to play my first game when it says that I have an invalid roster setting and my sub matrix is missing a player. But yet every player is there. I have it set so the staff fixes everything but I can't sim a game.

nvm - Figured it out.

Meh. Just hit a run time error when I went to visit the conference preview. And no saving either.

i'm just waiting for the demo to give that a quick spin before I pull the trigger on purchasing.

Meh. And now I go to do a new game and it crashes on the create the coach part :(