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The eternal question of "Who's No. 1?" in college football has taken some more definition in recent years with the Bowl Coalition Series ratings creating a No. 1 vs. No. 2 showdown at the end of the season to determine a "true" national champion without a playoff. The BCS wouldn't be necessary in college football video gaming, as there are only two contenders for the crown: NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 by 989 Studios and NCAA Football 2000 by EA Sports.

NCAA Football 99 broke new ground for college football simulations, leaving NCAA Gamebreaker behind in its blue-chip dust last year. But 989 and the developer of this game, Red Zone Interactive, Inc., brought in some heavy hitters to help shape up all aspects of this franchise for the 2000 edition.

The door appeared to be open for NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 to make big strides on its EA rival, as NCAA Football 2000 only offered minor tweaks and improvements to a game that already bordered on a classic. It was almost like EA didn't need to recruit any studs from Texas or Florida to bulk up its roster. But NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 didn't quite take advantage of this opening and still is No. 2 this season on the console college football gridiron. Read on to find out why.

Let's cut right to the chase: NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 is not a true college football simulation. It has more of a relaxed realism model that at times can be very fun but more often than not leads to frustration. There are flaws in all aspects of offense, defense and special teams, some more annoying than others.

On offense, running is handled pretty well in NCAA Gamebreaker 2000. My only major quibble is that running backs, especially at higher skill levels, make an ridiculous number of spin moves and shake-and-bakes before even reaching the line of scrimmage. This is an arcadish touch that leads to runners finding tiny holes and consistently gaining around 5 yards. Another quibble is the judging of momentum. There were countless times where it looked like the running back had gained at least 4 or 5 yards, but he was credited with only 1 or 2 yards. It just didn't look right. But there are touches of realism. Running backs drag tacklers for extra yardage, and stiff arms can be used to devastating effect. And holes seem to open more realistically than the "parting-of-the-Red Sea-or-nothing" approach to running in NCAA Football 2000.

The passing game is a mess. Passing at the True Freshman and Sophomore levels is a total breeze. It's not a question of whether you'll find anyone open. It's a question of which wide-open receiver do you wish to throw to? In a True Freshman game, I had Steve Bellissari of Ohio State pass for more than 500 yards in a game played with five-minute quarters! Quarterbacks do not miss at the lower levels, leading to games with between 800 and 1,000 yards of total offense between two teams. And compounding this problem is the total lack of a pass rush, either from the CPU or from the human player. It's very, very tough to mount any kind of pass rush, even at lower levels. Plus there doesn't seem to be much ability to use touch with a pass. Every pass feels like a lob, regardless of how long you hold down the pass button. The bullet pass feels like it's coming from a BB gun. What makes the passing game even more frustrating is that while a guy like Bellissari can throw for 500 yards, I couldn't even get option quarterback Madei Williams to complete a simple screen pass or an out pattern to a wide receiver. QB's are polarized in this game: They're either a Heisman winner or a Division III walk-on. The only positive aspect of the passing game is the MaxProtect feature. This feature allows you to press a button and keep your receivers in the backfield on a play to help block blitzing linebackers. Very, very cool. Too bad blitzing linebackers never make it in the backfield, anyways. All the offensive linemen are Orlando Pace clones.

While offensive formations look realistic, defensive formations are dubious, at best, especially when the CPU is playing defense. There isn't proper spacing among linebackers and secondary players, and the linebackers and secondary players often are lined up right on top of each other or with a huge gap between them.

And finally, there are hardly any penalties in this game. I played way too many games in which the only penalties called came when I showed off and got an unsportsmanlike-conduct hanky tossed my way. Very lame. Interceptions and fumbles also are as rare as seeing Steve Spurrier without his visor. It just all adds up to an incomplete gameplay experience.

This is a deep game with plenty of features to keep college pigskin freaks happy right through bowl season. This game has plenty of "tweak" factor.

First, there are four levels of play - True Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior. The skill level of the CPU increases all the way to Senior. There also are two modes of play - simulation and Total Control. As the name infers, Total Control simply offers more control options for players. Every Division I-A team is available, and many of those schools have classic teams from the past represented.

The skill level of the CPU offense and defense is adjustable but not to the level of NCAA Football 2000. Gamebreaker only has a few levels of adjustment for running and passing offenses and defenses. EA used slider bars, giving players a greater range of adjustment.

There is variable game speed, and quarter length can be adjusted anywhere from one to 15 minutes, at one-minute intervals. Full stats, polls and season-ending awards are available, including the Heisman Trophy. All-league, all-freshman and All-American teams also are named at the end of the season, a very nice feature. You can play at day or night, in rain, snow, wind and clear sky. There's also a random weather mode, which leaves the weather a mystery until game time. This is a great touch not found in NCAA Football 2000. Congrats to 989 and Red Zone for giving players such freedom.

A variety of modes are available, too. You can play a bowl season just like college teams do now, with the top two teams in the coalition playing for the national title. But 989 needs to pony up more dough for official licenses. Some of the bowls are available, but there are no Fiesta, Sugar or Orange Bowls! The national champion in the bowl season mode is determined in the "Gamebreaker Bowl." Very lame. I don't want to bust my butt going 11-0 during the regular season to play in the "Gamebreaker Bowl." You can also play in tournament mode, in which the top teams compete in a playoff to determine the national champion. Or in other words, the way it should be in college football! There's a fantasy league mode in which you score points for various accomplishments, and there's a career mode in which you start as an assistant coach at a lower-level Division I-A school and try to work your way up to a top job at a football factory like Nebraska or Penn State over the course of many seasons. Very time consuming, but a very neat feature.

And in what might just be the best feature of this game, you can save your graduating (well, at some schools, maybe) seniors to your memory card and import them to teams in 989's sister game, NFL Gameday 2000. NCAA Football 2000 doesn't offer this feature, one of those "man, why hasn't anyone done this before?" wrinkles. Very cool.

The create walk-on player option also is fun. You can build a player of various heights, weights, skills and moods. I got a big kick out of the descriptions of the players' moods: Nice, even, tricky, twisted, berserk. A sliding-scale system prevents you from creating a terminator player. If you bulk up in one area, you'll lose ability in another. Very nice feature.

The custom playbook editor is very well designed. You can break down every aspect of a play to create sweet money plays. You can pick certain routes for receivers, certain running and passing areas for running backs and quarterbacks, respectively, and certain blocking angles and schemes for linemen, such as pull, pass, screen, left and right. Your special plays then can be loaded in your playbook for use in games.

EA Sports earned plenty of praise for the deep recruiting mode offered in NCAA Football 2000. Yeah, it was deep all right. It was a game within a game that satisfied the recruiting junkies of the world, the kinds of people who watch all seven rounds of the NFL draft and subscribe to college football recruiting newsletters. I thought it was a little excessive. NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 has an expanded recruiting mode this year that is simpler than EA's in NCAA Football 2000. In Gamebreaker, you simply try to line up high-school or junior-college kids for visits from throughout the country and then sign them. You don't recruit by region like in NCAA Football 2000. Some people may call that less realistic; I call it more manageable.

It's ironic - the controls of this game are very tight, even though the players appear to be skating or floating often, especially during running plays. Running backs and receivers sometimes skate better than Michelle Kwan, but at least you know where they're skating. So it's hard to argue with that aspect of the controls. The controllers can be set to a default or inverted button setup. Standard procedure. Analog and Dual Shock are well-supported. I used a Sony Dual Shock Analog pad with this game and felt very comfortable.

The control was easy to pick up when playing in the simulation mode. There were very few button combinations, which kept everything clean. The Total Control mode is a double-edged sword. Sure, you get more control of the players. But there are so many different button combinations that it might be easier to study for and pass the bar exam than remember all of the combos. This sort of reminds me of the FIFA soccer series by EA - it's a little too steep of a learning curve with the controller.

Menus are very intuitive, although the fonts are tough to read in some menus. There are options to turn the music and announcer Keith Jackson on or off - before you ask how anyone could turn off the terrific Keith Jackson, you'd better read the section below about the sound. You can also have injuries on or off, set penalties to low or high and set the game speed to slow, normal or fast. Adjustable game speed is a nice touch that adds a big degree of customization to the game.

It's quite easy to view rosters and check on the ratings of various players and make complete changes to a team's schedule. My only beef with the menu interfaces is that the list of options streams horizontally across the bottom of the screen in a ticker format. If you miss the option you seek, you must wait for it to reappear on the ticker. It would have been nicer if you could just hit select and get a help menu.

The graphics of this game are very solid. EA and 989 took different directions with the color palettes in their football games starting in fall 1998, and it's no different this year. EA's colors are flat, while 989 leans toward the vivid side of the fence. It's really a matter of personal choice.

Players look realistic. They are scaled to realistic proportions. Linemen are much bigger than safeties, for example. Logos are visible on helmets. The helmets shine on clear days, which looks really trick. And in an extremely nice touch, players' uniforms actually get muddier as a rainy-day game progresses!

Stadiums are represented fairly well. All of the architectural features are accurate, and field markings are good. Patches of brown mud also are detectable on grass fields during rainy games. That's a very, very nice touch. But there are no players on the sidelines, an addition this year to NCAA Football 2000. The crowds in the stands also look very uniform and unrealistic. No aisles are shown in the grandstands. You simply see a mass of different-colored circles supposed to resemble fans. Not nearly as good as the EA crowd renderings. And one of the coolest features of NCAA Football 2000 by EA - the sky changing colors from the blue hues of daylight to the orange shades of dusk in late-afternoon games - is missing here.

The frame rate of the game is very smooth. There is no slowdown whatsoever. That's important, as this game leans more toward the arcade side of realism, so a quick frame rate is crucial. But the framerate is so smooth that players appear to skate quite a bit, especially on running plays. And I just don't understand why 989 has players performing little sidesteps when you have the analog control stick pointed straight ahead. If I wanted jukes, I would press the circle button for jukes.

Animations are smooth, but in arcade style, a bit exaggerated. There are too many big hits in which a running back or wide receiver is pancaked on a tackle. And while blocks are well executed, again almost every recipient of a good block is pancaked. Not exactly realistic.

After each offensive play, the human player is given the option to celebrate, show off or huddle. The celebration moves are fun and include players striking Heisman poses or thrusting their arms forward in a chopping motion to signify a first down. The celebration animations are especially fun as an in-your-face salute to a friend during two-player mode. But the showoff option is ludicrous. Players will perform handstands and other outrageous actions after pressing the showoff button. Sounds fun, right? Well, the referee will tag you with a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty every time. It's just not worth it and a graphical feature that this game can do without. The celebration option was enough.

I was surprised that this game had no full-motion video at the start. That's a staple of any sports video game these days, and while I usually only watch them once and then never see them again, preferring to head straight into game play, I still was curious as to why 989 and Red Zone didn't include an FMV.

The sound of this game is mediocre, at best. Let's start with the positives, because there aren't many. The sound of the players grunting and pads snapping and popping on contact are crisp and realistic.

989 Sports trumpeted the play-by-play commentary of Keith Jackson heavily in the press materials of the game. 989 promoted that Jackson calls every game in NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 - despite the fact that he only called Pac-10 games this year in reality during the first year of his semi-retirement from television. Well, if Jackson was this repetitive on television, he should have been put out to pasture in telecasts of Pop Warner games. Jackson follows the play nicely, but his limited number of phrases became extremely repetitive after only a couple of quarters. If I heard, "stopped cold," "hit harder than a blackjack pine" or "car crash" one more time, I was about ready to toss my controller through my television screen. It's that tedious.

The fight songs are realistic and accurate, but I have one small gripe. Some of the schools' fight songs sound like they were played by real bands playing real brass instruments. But some sound like they were played on the brass section of a synthesizer by a cheesy lounge band. It's a small point, but it detracts from the "at the game" feel.

989 Sports deserves heavy criticism for the crowd noises. First, the same endless loop of cheering that has been a staple of NCAA Gamebreaker and NFL Gameday since their inception is used here again. It's an endless drone that is grating. And the crowd doesn't react well enough in big situations. Sure, the crowd will chant "defense, defense," when the home team is defending deep in its end of the field. But the crowd doesn't get that jacked up after a big gain by the home team's offense or a crucial third-down play in the home team's end or around midfield. I just never felt the sound, pageantry or excitement of a real college football game when playing NCAA Gamebreaker 2000.

NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 is not a bad game. In fact, it has many fun aspects. But it's sort of a paradoxical game in the sense that its best features - the deep modes of play, fun recruiting feature, career mode and play editor - appeal to those gamers seeking a hardcore college football sim. But the gameplay just isn't sim-like enough to satisfy those who want an ultra-realistic college football game. And the Total Control Mode just gets too complicated at times doing finger gymnastics with the controller to be pure fun.

In some regards, NCAA Gamebreaker leans toward an arcade game. The big hits, exaggerated animations and skating players almost give this game an NFL Blitz-type feel at times. This can create some incredible fun, especially in the two-player mode. But for every fun game, there's another in which your quarterback can't complete a simple screen pass or a mediocre quarterback lights you up for 400 yards. Or you see a defensive formation that looks like a group of 11 friends at a party instead of an actual 5-2 or 4-3 defense.

In the end, this game is somewhat schizophrenic: It can't decide whether it wants to be an arcade game or a simulation of college football. 989 and Red Zone need to make that decision before they develop and publish NCAA Gamebreaker 2001. Because right now, NCAA Football 2000 sets a standard for college football simulations that NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 doesn't reach.