Using Christmas as an excuse, I decided not to go to work this weekend and play computer games instead. The first one I wanted to try was NHL 2001, the latest incarnation of a highly successful series. The series might have been too successful, or I simply got too conservative, but this game offended me.
The evolution of NHL
First of all, I would like to mention a couple of changes the real game of NHL went through in the past few years. These changes were incorporated into the game, so I consider them to be important enough to mention.
NHL is no more the game of good combination and beautiful goals. The times changed, and mainly because of the phenomenal goaltenders of the last decade, NHL became a game of the goalies. Names like Hasek, Brodeur and Roy are better recognized than Palffy, Demitra or Satan, some of the top scorers. Defenders, once the backbone of the team, were rendered into the position of brutes and boxers.
Thus, the fans look for two things in a hockey game – spectacular saves and fist fights. The spectacular goals are no more as desired as they used to be. This meant a challenge for the creators of the game, which they solved easily – they increased the number of shots in the game and increased the qualities of the goalies. This way, you’ll get numerous replays of good saves.
The Game
Compared with NHL 99, the graphics, music and commentary improved, but the gameplay suffers so badly that I decided to give my copy of the game to my least favorite cousin. Let us take a closer look first at the positives of the game, and then I will turn to a lengthy rambling why to avoid it.
Graphics
Compared with the older versions, the graphics are phenomenal, with an almost Playstation 2 feel. The movements of the players, their facial expressions and the close-ups are so natural, that I almost expect to see real players next year. The creators took all the advantage they could from these graphics and created numerous cut scenes of players teasing each other, talking or even acting angry when sent to the penalty box. It took me full 10 games to get tired of these cut scenes and start skipping them.
Sound
I don’t know why so few people recognize it, but the series offers some of the best and most appropriate music of all computer games. NHL 2001 does not disappoint in this aspect, and even offers two full songs that are supposed to be well known (don’t know, never registered them on radio). The game also features the sounds of players when they get hit, which I welcomed a lot.
Commentary
Much better than in the previous games, the commentary finally does not sound like the automated phone response software. Furthermore, this time the commentators got it right and don’t make mistakes such as “Buffalo was particularly weak at penalty killing” when Buffalo had a 100% PK success rate. However, the commentary sometimes gets drowned in the music, and I yet have to find the controls to adjust the volume.
The gameplay
Here we go this is the why-this-game-is-one-of-the-worst-I-ever-played section. It is all in the gameplay.
First, the camera angles make the game hardly playable. While in the previous games the camera was more distant and usually high above the ice, the camera here is much lower and closer. The reason for this is that the players are much more complex, and the game would slow down considerably when more than a handful of players were visible at any one time. I realized this when 5 or more players are visible – the game starts to starts jumping and freezing (Even on my PII-450 with 128MB RAM and a 16MB 3D Voodoo 2 card).
However, with these camera angles it is impossible to read the field. Often, the players are not where you’d expect them to be, and at other times you suddenly run into five opposing players, who waited at you right behind your field of sight. This is especially frustrating during line changes, when you rush against one defender and pass to the side only to find out there’s nobody but you in the offensive zone.
However, the thing that I hate most is the offense EA committed on me. EA has been dominating the sports games business for a while, and now it has adopted an “I know best what you want” attitude. Even though this bold statement is supported by only one game from the current batch of sports games, I am not about to try any other current EA game.
What is this terrible thing I talk about? EA decided to make the games more exciting. Consequently, the gameplay became highly illogical, so unlike the real game, and very frustrating. The problem, you will face is that the opposing team, when losing a close game, will not stage an effort to tie the score; they will play with the same effort. However, once you are up by five or six goals, the opposing players transform to Supermen, with no Kryptonite to stop them. Suddenly, a player with the puck will not be checked even when all your players attempt to, the player with go through your players and score with almost every shot from the blue line, no matter is the best goalie in standing against him, along with the whole team lined in the path of the shot. Very often, I barely managed to win a game that I have been leading 8:0, and I realized that if would be much safer to score two quick goals, and then only cruise with the puck on the ice for the rest of the time.
This automatic adjustment of the opponent strength offends me. Instead of such an opponent simply giving up and trying not to injure any players, while trying out new combinations, the opposing team rolls over everything I put in its way. I despise EA for this cheap attempt to make the games more exciting and would like to tell them this way that the player should decide the difficulty level, and not the game. When I lead by six goals, it means the I am far superior, and I should adjust the difficulty level in the next game accordingly, or simply stick with the same difficulty if I enjoy ripping the opposing teams apart.
There are numerous other problems with the game. As mentioned at the beginning, there are many more shots per game. I clocked in average 80 shots per 30 min game, and had even over 100 shots on certain occasions. In addition, the fighting transformed from the intricate dance from the previous versions to a dull button hitting. Your only concern would be whether your player’s “life force” gets below 50% or not when defeating the opponent.
In conclusion, I cannot recommend this game even to first-time players of this series. Not when older versions are still being sold. Even though the superior graphics and commentary earned this game a second star, the gameplay is seriously flawed by an automatic adjustment of the difficulty level, once you play too good. This makes the game very unrealistic and frustrating. I would be much more happy if EA just released a data disk to NHL 99 with the new rosters. Please stay away of this game and opt for an older version – you will have much more fun with older rosters than
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