NHL 09
If you go around online reading about the game, you’ll hear a lot that it’s the best hockey video game ever. To that, I agree.
My Xbox 360 had online issues with NHL 08 (poor performance getting into games and downloading rosters). Luckily, those issues have been solved. And in addition, they added the most obvious online feature that I wanted in 08; Play a Friend. It’s simple, you click it, you select someone from your friends list, and boom, you’re in a game.
They’ve also added Be a Pro mode. It’s really cool, and you should try it (apparently it’s been in baseball before?).
And there’s a slick thing where you can manually select the “arena music” for a hockey team (or all of them) from your 360 or from your computer. A really neat touch.
All that being said, here’s the one thing that needs to be said.
As with many new features that make it into video games, the first year implementation of them is frequently massively over-powering. So for this year, I’m referring to the defensive stick lift.
Of course this is a typical defensive move for a defender, but if you’re good at it, you can completely dominate the game.
One such game, a friend of mine and myself were playing online. We were sharing the controller, switching each period. We are both pretty good at the game, we beat most people online. We played one fellow who was SO proficient at the stick lift, it made the game super frustrating and nearly impossible to play. He controlled the puck probably 80% of the time. We were lucky to only lose by a goal.
One feature I’d like to see online is a mode where both players are forced to play a random team. I’m really tired of seeing the same 4 teams online (this year it’s Detroit and Pittsburgh, last year was Anaheim and Ottawa). Seriously, I’m really sick of playing Detroit.