More like SuckHL2k9, right guys?
"How did I get myself into this?"
Due to some unforseen delays (that EA promises is an issue on Microsoft’s end rather than their own), the NHL09 demo that was supposed to have been released this week is going to remain under wraps for a little while longer.
But fear not, video game hockey nerds! The fine folks over at 2k have released the demo for NHL2k9. For lack of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon when I should have been at work, I gave it a whirl for four or five periods.
Here’s my protracted hands-on thoughts on it:
Obviously you could only pick between the Penguins and Red Wings to start, and you can only play for one period, which is fair enough. First time out of the gate, I went with the Pens, and noticed that the Wings’ home rink in the game looks more like a big AHL barn than Joe Louis Arena.
My initial impressions were that the intro was slick if not overdone (showing a highlight video on the ice before the game) but other than that, it was inoffensive and would have been a nice touch on 2k’s PS2 games. Now it just seems tacked on for the sake of being there, but it’s better than a blank load screen, one supposes. Then the actual introduction of the Detroit Red Wings started up and they all just kind of clumsily stepped onto the ice rather than skating out with velocity. Teams come out with more energy for warmups. It’s not a major point, but it felt mishandled.
Once the actual game started, I tried the old EA trick of rapidly pulling the right analog stick back to continually try to win the draw well before the puck was dropped. It was a nice touch that the ref backed Datsyuk out of the circle and told him to calm down. I obliged, and the game was on. I lost the opening faceoff, which Crosby kicked back to no one in particular, a realistic stroke that EA’s games lack. In NHL09, I’m sure, every faceoff won will go to exactly the player you intended it to go to. That often felt video game-y to me. Point for 2k there.
After that though, the game opened up as Gonchar slowly (slooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwlllllllllyyyyyyy) brought the puck into the Detroit zone and passed down low to Crosby in the corner. This play highlighted my two main problems with the game. One, everyone skates like they’re in mud. There’s a “turbo” button that EA was wise to do away with years ago, but even with that, players don’t exactly fly through the neutral zone with the grace and beauty of a Detroit power play breakout. The fastest skaters in the game have two speeds, plod and trot. The situation called for Gonchar’s pass to Crosby to be slick and crisp as there was a Red Wing skating toward the boards to take the pass away, and off the stick, it sure sounded like it would be. The audio was that of a slap pass (even though that’s not what it was animated like), but it was remarkably slow. Once it reached Crosby, it just kind of stuck to his stick as opposed to having an animation of Crosby receiving the pass.
I had Crosby skate along the end boards down low, and three players, two Red Wings and Malkin, followed him behind the net. When Crosby came out from the other side, Malkin still hadn’t transitioned to the backdoor, but still was standing idly behind the net while the pair of Red Wings were in hot pursuit of Sid the Kid, and that was another problem. The AI players often have no clue where to go when the team is on the attack. At several points in the game, I tried a wing-to-wing pass on an odd-man rush through the neutral zone and had the center and opposite wing simply skate into eachother and have the pass go by both.
I skated back behind the net to allow Malkin time to reposition himself, which he eventually did. He was wide open on the backdoor, so when I tried to slide a cross-crease pass to him for a tap-in goal, it once again went slowly, and was also intercepted by the Pens’ other wing, who had taken that opportunity to streak down the slot and then weakly push a wrist shot toward the net. Which was problem No. 4: you have little control over where your pass goes. Very little. Many times you’ll try to hit the open man and have it go to the one that’s double covered for no reason at all.
Osgood covered the puck at that point and I got a chance to skate as the second lines. But so far, I had four major problems with the game, and I was one shift in. The Wings won the ensuing faceoff and meandered up-ice, which brought me to problems Nos. 5 and 6: no AI player has any clue what to do on defense and no one ever faces the right direction. The left trigger, ostensibly, is the “skate backwards” button, but I quickly found that “backwards” was more or less a subjective direction. It was rarely “backwards facing the puck.” More often it was “backwards facing the sideboards for no reason.” So when the center stepped around both the AI-controlled left wing at the blue line and then Ryan Whitney, whom I was controlling, inside the right circle, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Then he ripped a low-angle slap shot from almost in the corner for some inexplicable reason.
The surprise there was that the shot beat Fleury despite him hugging the post. “How did that get by him?” I mumbled. Then I got my answer on the replay. It simply went through his chest. The slap shot from below and outside the faceoff dot was so hard that it simply passed through Marc-Andre Fleury as if he were Patrick Swayze in “Ghost.”That was all the Wings needed to pull out the W. They threw it into choke-the-life-out-of-them mode after that and I lost 1-0.
The goal also gave me my first close-up look at the player models. They all look like they were drawn by the kid that did Curtis Sanford’s helmet. Very avant garde. Goalie pads look like the guys wearing them are constantly shrugging (though after giving up goals that defy the laws of physics and pass unharmed through your body, I guess you can’t do anything but shrug). The players themselves still look like zombie versions of themselves at best, and nothing like themselves at worst.
The next game I tied 2-2 though, and that actually featured the only two authentic-ish moments I experienced in actual gameplay. Lidstrom crushed a point shot that was going well wide, so Datsyuk reached out and deftly redirected it into the net. Later, Tomas Holmstrom scored a garbage goal. Just like real life.
Both my goals were on breakaways by Crosby and Malkin, respectively, both of whom were cherry picking between the red line and the opposite blue line despite our trailing 2-0. They didn’t even really shoot. They kind of just poked the puck past Osgood both times. It was stupid.
The next few periods I played yielded similar results and I quickly grew bored with constantly having guys pass into the boards on the counter-attack and dumping the puck instead of passing because I accidentally hit the left button on my way to pressing the left trigger. This game is really quite bad. I can’t believe Rick Nash would lend his likeness to such an inferior product.
