With today's release of NCAA Basketball '09, the end of the '09 sports season is now officially upon us.

With it, come all the lessons we learned from the success stories (NHL '09) and the unforgettable failures (both EA Football games, NBA 2K9) that made up our year of sports gaming.

So as we think about where the sports genre should go in 2010, and what exactly the members of next year's class need to do to be considered a "success," here are five key areas that could determine which games make the "Dean's list" and which games get sentenced to "academic probation."

1. Turning online leagues into something more than a glorified ladder system

As exciting as watching a live sporting event can be, the thing that makes sports a big enough deal for television stations to cover it 24/7 is the drama that sports create off the field.

The debates over which team's the best, who deserves to go to what bowl, which conference is the toughest, which player deserves the MVP, etc. are all questions that sports fans preoccupy themselves with just as much, if not more, than the games that generate (and answer) those questions.

Though a few recent video games have tried, no developer to date has been able to create the type of off-the-field drama that keeps people immersed in the "real" world of sports for more than just the weekend of the big game.

Here's what's been tried so far:

• EA's NCAA and Madden games on the PS2 and Xbox that had the computer automatically generate newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and radio shows based on what was happening around the league.

• 2K's NFL 2K5 (Xbox/PS2) and College Hoops 2K8 (Xbox 360/PS3) both had virtual versions of real-life sports analysts hosting weekly shows that recapped all the scores and highlights from the games of the week.

While these features were all great starts, it's surprising that the developers at EA and 2K have not tried to take these ideas to the next level in any of their recent sports titles.

In terms of adding a little SportsCenter-style drama into our video games leagues, the best tool we really have right now is 2K's newly renovated league websites, which provide all kind of stats, standings, boxscores, and league news on a professional-looking homepage.

But as nice as 2K's league websites look, they force the users to generate the most interesting types of content themselves by writing articles, uploading videos, and posting content to the league page.

Because leagues that do put in that extra effort to create their own "drama" are rather rare, it would be a huge benefit for online leagues if sports developers could finally program a game that was smart enough to create its own recaps and make its own highlights of the games as they're being played, so that the users could watch daily, weekly, even yearly highlights of their leagues like they would during a "real" season of their favorite sport.

EA has the ESPN license, and 2K has their own set of personalities, so why not make full-use of those likenesses by programming a game that can create "SportsCenter" episodes and cover the drama of our leagues with the same level of detail that we see in a television broadcast?

Imagine:

Watching a virtual College Gameday crew broadcast their weekly show from your campus, then booing a virtual Lee Corso as he slams your mascot's head into the ground and picks the visiting team to win.

2. Making the virtual "us" look more like the real "us"

Nothing excites me more about the future of sports gaming than seeing how franchises like FIFA, NHL, and NBA 2K/NBA Live are finally giving players the option of completely removing the AI from the game and replacing it with human friends or foes.

In fact, I hope that this year was only the beginning of a genre-wide movement that eventually culminates in having entire leagues of human players, with not a single line of AI code in sight.

But as great as it is to have your friends playing alongside you, the experience is often cheapened by the fact that the virtual representation of you and your friends just don't look anything like "the real thing."

That's why I'm expecting next year's crop of sports games to step-up it's level of customization.

With the power of today's consoles, there is no reason why we should still be limited to the same handful of pre-set team logos/arenas/uniforms that we all got used to back in the days of the PS2 and the Xbox.

While a few sports games have made huge strides in specific areas of player/team customization, no single game has yet to pool all of its competitor's ideas together into a single, powerful set of creation tools.

I hope that some member of the 2010 class finally achieves the goal of giving gamers an ultimate player/team builder that lets us create players and teams who really look like us, not just hideous-looking cavemen sporting predetermined uniform/logo combinations so bad that they wouldn't even cut it in the NBDL.

Imagine:

The logo editor of Backbreaker, combined with the uniform editor of All Pro Football 2K8, and the Tiger Woods create-a-player system (complete with face-mapping technology).

3. Extending the possibilities of online team play

With massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft bringing millions of gamers to its online servers, it surprises me that no sports game this year outside of NHL '09 attempted to introduce the concept of "persistent online characters" into the sports genre.

Then again, if EA and 2K's servers can't even handle the traffic of the 100,000 or so people who play games like NHL '09 and NBA 2K9 without frequently crashing, freezing, or causing game-ending network errors, maybe there's a reason why sports games haven't brought the size of their game worlds up to par with Warcraft just yet.

Still, if the sports developers could actually get their servers to handle the weight of a hundred-thousand or so connections, I feel like the potential for a Warcraft-like level of success is certainly there.

Just replace "guilds" with "teams," "mages" and "warriors" with "point guards" and "power forwards," and I have no doubt that the players would start flocking to the servers and join together to start the quest for "the one (championship) ring."

While I don't think any of us would like to see RPG elements such as having player performance based on how much "gear" you own or how high your "experience level" is, it would be interesting to have players competing in a "fictional marketplace" for things like salaries and endorsements.

Now that would give us a reason to bring back the "Crib" feature.

Bottom line: EA Canada's NHL '09 has set the standard for online team play, now it's up to all members of our 2010 class to raise their game to NHL '09's level.

Imagine:

Beating out 150 other players for the NBA scoring title, out-hitting 15 other safeties and earning a trip to the Pro Bowl, becoming the highest paid shortstop in the league and being the first guy to install an Olympic-sized swimming pool in your backyard.

4. Pre- and post-release support for games via developer interaction with customers

It is undeniable that, in the business of gaming, both the companies and the customers benefit from bouncing ideas off each other.

The recent entries into EA series like Madden and NBA Live, are all great examples of games that improved (in terms of quality and sales) because the developers tweaked their products in response to the issues that their customers were having.

This type of interaction not only results in a greater product for the customers, but it also helps the company build its reputation with those customers, as it makes the customers feel like they have a say in how the games they play ultimately pan out.

The problem sports gamers are experiencing right now is that:

a) not all developers are on board with this plan

b) the developers that are directly involved with the customers often have limits on the amount of changes they can "afford" to make to their products on a yearly basis.

Imagine:

Developers that actually update and re-balance their games on a weekly basis like Valve or Blizzard do for their PC games.

5. Games that actually work as advertised

As great as it is for developers to be improving their games year-round via patches and updates, game companies really need to stop leaning so heavily on their customers to act as their “beta testers.”

Games should always be playable from day one, and not have to be patched a month or two later before the games actually work as advertised.

Reason being, as important as having a great game with great features is, none of that actually matters if the game or the features within the game don’t actually work like they're supposed to (you hear that, NBA 2K9?).

This year in particular, it seemed like none of the major sports games shipped without having some sort of critical technical issues that brought the enjoyment of the game down a couple levels, if not completely.

Just to name a few of the chief culprits:

NCAA '09

• Broken sliders
• Numerous bugs related to roster editing/sharing
• Online dynasties crashing

Madden '09

• No CPU sliders
• Direct-snap glitch that temporarily ruined the game’s competitive balance online
• Frequent freezing/crashing in franchise mode
• Broken player progression in franchise mode
• An absurd amount of minor bugs/glitches ranging from frustrating to hilarious

NHL '09

• the “dirty disc” error that could only be “sometimes” fixed by clearing your cache
• constant freezing in community lobbies
• frequent difficulty connecting to opponents during EASHL club games
• the now-infamous “face-off glitch” that causes online games to lock up (a holdover from last year’s game)

NBA 2K9

• a number of broken, non-functional cameras, including the series’ signature “2K cam.”
• new 5 vs. 5 mode unplayable because of lag
• free-throw glitch that makes timing the first free-throw a total guessing game (back from NBA 2K8, even though it was eventually patched in that game)
• servers still prone to game-ending network errors and frequent down-time (2K games have been doing this since the Dreamcast days)
• lots of issues with rosters, including an inability to save them, certain rosters causing the game to freeze, etc.

The sad thing is that the issues I've listed here are limited strictly to technical errors, and when developers have to spend their time stamping out technical bugs, the important stuff like gameplay exploits never even gets to be addressed in the limited "two patches per game" cycle that most sports developers seem to follow.

Imagine:

Paying $60 for a game that actually works out of the box.

That's what I'm looking for in 2010; what about you?

Sound off in the space below, and let everyone know exactly what it is that you've got your eyes on in 2010.

-- Jayson Young