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[FightyF]

An Xbox rep brought it to the Calgary Best Buy for a nationwide tournament, located at various BBs around the country. Today's play was to determine the city champion and next week they'll play over Live to determine the national champion to win some goodies ($1000 Gift card).

I was working and too busy to play, but my brother (who used to post here as Sonki on the old forum, but hasn't had the new account accepted yet) and his friend joined. His friend won in the end and is the Calgary champ.

So I never played it, but saw a bit of it. Can I post impressions despite not playing it? SURE! This is Gaming-Age, is it not?

The game must have been set to a fast speed setting on default, because it was too unrealistically fast. The new skating animations look pretty good to me. But the game seemed to still control at an odd pace and the moment still seemed pretty eratic. The character models are a bit more accurate than ESPNs of course, and the facial animations are great. The presentation is much much better than ESPNs...but I didn't get a chance to hear much of the commentary. This was the Xbox version and despite having great character models and animations, it still gets blown away visually by ESPN.

Well if my bro gets his username added I'll ask him to post impressions of the game.

 

[DopeyFish]

EA has always slaughtered in presentation, it's just the overall execution is meh.

 

[Crazymoogle]

Glad to see there are some other calgary GAFers. I saw that Best Buy tourney ad but had other things to do.

 

[Alucard]

EA has always slaughtered in presentation, it's just the overall execution is meh.

Bingo.

EA = the trophy girlfriend with a hot body and not a lot of brains
ESPN = the cute girlfriend with a good personality

I still have a lot of problems with ESPN (mostly dealing with presentation) but it still slaughters EA in the gameplay department.

 

[FightyF]

I honestly thought that ESPN's presentation for NHL 2K4 was very good actually. Pretty solid for the most part. This year it's an unconnected mess of cutscenes and abrupt game/period endings. I can't believe it. I shudder each time I think of it. Plus the slow down before the face-off (which you can avoid if you pause the game, check out a replay, and then unpause it...it's a clue that it has to do with poor buggy programming rather than the system being too slow)...I can't handle that...

Yet the gameplay is sofa king awesome that I can't stop playing it...

 

[B E N K E]

NHL 2005 is a definite step up for EA. There's a lot of content in the package: Dynasty Mode, Elite Leagues (D, SF, SWE), Free for all (4 players, one goalie), World Cup of Hockey.

 

[scorcho]

i mistakingly got the PC version the other day and am very disappointed. compared to 2k5, the action feels very disjointed, very herky-jerky. skaters move too fast and there's always at least 3 bodies lying flat on the ice because this game JUST CHECKS TOO MUCH. who needs board play, bumps or sweet deke moves when you can JUST SMACK THE CRAP OUT OF EVERYONE? OMGWTF!!

i tweaked the sliders to hell, lowered the speed to it's smallest settings, same with hits and it was still too exaggerated for my tastes. in terms of gameplay, it only trumps 2k5 in goalie dekes, and that might be because i suck at 2k5's implimentation.

 

[Alucard]

Yeah, I'm still crap with 2k5's deke system. I think I need to practice in a shootout or something. Anyways, I just smoked Montreal 8-1, with Aleksey Morozov getting 2 goals and 2 assists. Woo. I'm not sure if I'm getting better (currently playing on Pro) or if teams are just sometimes off their game. My players will go through long hot/cold streaks too. I wish I could adjust the frequency of injuries but I can't seem to find that option...I HATE how your lines are constantly being messed up because one guy gets an injury.

 

[FightyF]

Talked to my bro and he said everyone there was dissappointed with it. Someone even picked up 2K5 while there.

He and his friend kept on referring to 2K5 and preaching it to the people, as if they were NHL 2K5 missionaries. But I guess some of the goals and happenings were a joke. Ie. one goal was scored when a goalie held it, then skated up to the blue line (apparently the goalies can skate faster than the players!) passed it off for a breakaway since everyone was deep in the zone.

 

[FightyF]

Oh yeah and I have to mention that the rosters are extremely outdated. ie. Ricci and Damphouse are still on the Sharks. Pretty sad.

 

[Alucard]

Regardless, we're still in search of the perfect hockey game. If the 2K series would just fix some small annoyances, the search would be over.