Dr. Saturday welcomes Yahoo! Sports colleague, fellow garlic ball aficionado and guest reviewer MJD of Shutdown Corner.

In an incredibly irksome little move, EA has stuck a number of little money grabs into the game, particularly in Dynasty Mode. For 150 "Microsoft points," you can buy a new "pipeline state" to give you an edge in recruiting in the state of your choosing. For 1,000 Microsoft Points ($12.50), you can buy all of the Dynasty Accelerators -- Recruiting Advisor, Coaching Seminar, etc. -- which will affect every team you control in Dynasty Mode and online Dynasty Mode.

This seems like such a low-rent thing to do. If a game is capable of doing something, and you purchase the game, the game should do that thing. It leaves a nasty taste. Put yourselves in the shoes of a loyal EA consumer. You've waited months to buy the game. You go out, you spend their $60 on it, and as soon as they get home and pop the game in, EA's grubby little paws are reaching out through the console for their spare change. The first hour after you've purchased a video game should be nothing but fun. That's what you paid for, right? To me, it feels like buying a pay-per-view, and then someone saying, "Hey, for $5 more, we'll show you the really cool footage. You've already hooked a customer. Why push it?

Let's get to the good stuff, though, because there is some of it here. There's one new feature to this year's game that I count as a major advancement, and something that every single team sports game created in the future should have: Online TeamBuilder
You no longer "Create a School" through the game's menus; you actually go online, upload your own logos, and customize every single thing about a team. If I want to create the Yahoo! Sports University Dr. Saturdays, not only can I do it, but I can put Matt Hinton's mugshot on the side of my helmets, and a picture of him eating garlic balls at midfield of my stadium. I'm not going to, but I could.

We should be past the days of 20 lame logos and four uniform styles, and finally, we are. I don't know if this is a feature they plan to introduce for Madden, too, but if not, it's finally that one awesome feature present in NCAA that isn't available in the "big brother" franchise.

EA lets you create 12 teams online. You can do more than that, but if you want that 13th team, you're going to have to pay for it. Because, you know, we're running out of room on the Internet or something.

Another heavily-hyped feature is the "Road to Glory," which is really just last year's Campus Legend mode with some generic clips of Erin Andrews spliced in. I'm not going to say anything bad about it, because I appreciate and adore Erin Andrews on a much deeper level than anyone else does. Just know that the "Road to Glory" is not some cool new feature.

The other thing EA is hyping about this game is the "Season Showdown," which I'm not totally sure I understand. I think it allows you to choose your favorite team, earn points for your team through various in-game accomplishments, and then EA adds up all the points from all the different people who have their favorite teams, and whoever has the most points, wins. This will naturally be Florida, Ohio State, USC, Texas or some other uber-popular school. I don't see anything there for me to get excited about, because I generally root against those schools.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, there's the gameplay, which is the best it's ever been. I don't think there's any one gameplay feature EA can point to and say, "Yes, we have improved this massively," but when taken as a whole, with all the new animations, the ability to break out of tackles, the more defined pocket for the quarterback, the game just plays at a Billy Dee Williams level of smooth.

I've got to give NCAA Football 10 the official MJD stamp of goodness. I'd like to hate it, because I feel like the "Hey, buy this! And buy this, too!" opportunities in the game are really crass and unfair to the consumer. But there are too many other cool things for me to dislike the game. Sorry. I'm only human.

The TeamBuilder is very sweet, if you're into that level of customization, and the gameplay is so agreeable. There's an element of smoothness in this game that hasn't been present in any other football game since NFL 2K5. [That is some high praise indeed. -- Ed.] NCAA 10 just plays really, really well, and I feel like the TeamBuilder adds a truly substantive off-field feature. It's hard to ask for much more than that.

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MJD is the editor of Shutdown Corner, the NFL blog at Yahoo! Sports, and he can be reached here. He should probably feel like he's getting too old for video games, but he does not. He also really does appreciate Erin Andrews in ways you couldn't even begin to understand.