NCAA Football 06 is the first football title out of Electronic Arts since the omni-powerful game maker's Spring Of Licence Exclusivity. It is probably one of the last good football games ever.

A little background: For the past many years, EA's Madden NFL football games have utterly owned their market segment. When fanboys and tailgaters go shopping for electronics, they come home with Madden. Madden = football games, full stop.

That is the business side of it, anyway. For years, the key facts about the actual games themselves (whether they are any fun to play, for example), have only barely figured in Joe Fan's decision to buy one football game over another. This remained true no matter how good the competition was, even when side-by-side comparisons clearly showed that year's Madden up as the inferior offering. EA's college football games, cleverly retailed alongside Madden and packaged for maximum cross-sell appeal drew enormous benefit from the prestige of the flagship. The impression, even when internal differences were significant, was that there were two Maddens: one with NFL teams, and one with college teams.

So you can see why critics were so excited last year, when the competing ESPN football series came up with its best outing yet and then brought it to market at the ridiculously low price of $29.99. At last, all the reviewer-weenies said to themselves, we'll see a fair fight. This is clear evidence that reviewer weenies never have any idea what they are talking about. Really, you should stop reading this and go look at the classifieds instead.

For the fight that followed the ESPN price drop was not fair at all. EA took its team of highly trained SWAT negotiators into NFL headquarters and emerged moments later with an Exclusive Licence. Translation: from this point forward, only EA's games will be able to include real NFL teams and ream NFL stadiums.

The juggernaught rolled on, and shortly after the NFL announcement, EA wrapped up a similar exclusivity deal with the NCAA for college football. Then EA got control of the ESPN licence itself, leaving the old publisher with some code for excellent football games, but no uniforms and no broadcaster to wrap them in. EA kicked the competition's face in, basically.

While the lawyers were thusly occupied, EA's notoriously hard-working coders and designers were at it as hard as ever. NCAA Football 06 is the fruit of their labour. The good news for them is that a little relief is finally at hand. They will get their long-overdue holiday. They will have eight-hour days and time with their families. They do not have to try hard anymore. When you are the only game in town, literally, you can pretend that you are Bill Gates and your football game is Windows, and the thing can crash and eat hard drives like it is an evil space robot and not even that will stop your customers from pouring their money into your vault.

OK, enough cynicism. Realistically, the upcoming Madden will probably be the last good football game before the Begin Of The Great Decline, seeing how it too was in production before the licencing fracas began. Let's think of NCAA as The Penultimate Good Football Game, and let's try to put the Big Picture out of our heads and just enjoy the play.

The play is pretty good, but you would expect. There are enormous collections of college teams and stadiums and conferences to choose from, complete with all the mascots and rivalries you could hope for. There are enormous playbooks, but the thing is tuned for the thumbs, not for the football mind, and you will have a good time with it even if you hate sports and just want to make colourful uniforms bash into each other. There is something called the Hit Stick, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The list could go on, but there's no point, really. It's not as if you're comparison shopping.