Skating backwards

by ERIK LEIJON

Hell hath no fury like this reviewer’s scorn after playing this year’s batch of NHL games. Instead of strangling chickens, my typical ritual for dealing with crappy-game rage, I’ll munch on a few morphine tablets and tell ye the tale.

NHL 08 (Multi/EA Sports, EA Canada) and NHL 2K8 (Multi/2K Sports, Kush) are so far gone in terms of providing a fun, remotely genuine hockey experience that years of micro-managing the useless details have rendered these two a couple of over-polished turds.

Both games have their qualities, but when the same problems stick out like sore thumbs (as were mine attempting to wrap my brain around the terrible new control schemes) for five years running, you just want to go Steve Downie on some hapless bug tester. In the two sadomasochistic weeks I spent with both games, my games/franchises/roster updates caused a total of 11 crashes. I wasn’t able to finish the first game of my EA dynasty/franchise mode three times because the game would freeze during auto-save. Turning off auto-save dramatically reduces the number of crashes on NHL 08, but why force-feed us a feature that could cause irreparable harm to my PS3?

The 2K series has been slightly superior for a few years now (like how Delta Burke is slightly hotter than the Cryptkeeper), so apparently that gave developers at Kush carte blanche to bring the series to next-gen with no new features, hardly any upgraded graphics, and the same unrealistic goalie animations. The same scoring move—cutting from one end of the slot area to the other and waiting for the goalie to drop—has worked since the Chris Drury Dreamcast days.

For some ungodly reason, they messed around with the controls (thankfully the right analog poke check remains), so now two buttons must be used to take a slap shot. The profile managing system stinks yet again, by forcing you to go to a separate loading screen to switch profiles, and some features like auto-save become unusable with multiple profiles. Now one has to pre-set their preferences in advance, so getting into a game in under two minutes is impossible.

In last year’s edition, EA’s NHL supposedly broke new ground with their dual-analog control system, even though it was clearly the same game with a different passing button. Four perfectly good face buttons go unused; shooting and dekes are all done with the same analog stick, and passing is done with the R2 button. It’s confusing, and even after testing it for 50 games, the classic controls felt more natural. It merely seems like change for the sake of it, and sadly they haven’t bothered to improve the utterly insipid AI, the unavoidable 10–9 contests and 50 percent shooting percentages. The “AI learning” metre only means the tougher AI will score a bunch of goals in the final minute.

My biggest beef with NHL 08 and NHL 2K8 is that every year, the developers spend their limited development time to make new deke moves. I can’t explain why they feel stickhandling requires an overhaul every year, and even the most glaring bugs keep returning. Both are clearly using the same engines as the old-gen versions, so they don’t even look on par with other sports games. I have been playing hockey games since NHL 94. I can recall every minute detail of nearly every series, including Breakaway, Faceoff, ESPN Hockey Night, RHI, Stanley Cup, Solid Ice, Wayne Gretzky, even Blades of fucking Steel, and I can assure you that in terms of playability, we are going backwards. The lockout may have improved the action on the ice, but the same can’t be said for EA and 2K.