Today's blog will be about this game, a bit about the series in general, as it celebrated it's 18th year if I'm not mistaken.
The first game of this style made by EA Sports was NHL Hockey for the Genesis. It was the most accurate portraying of hockey yet. Mind you the previous contenders were games like Ice Hockey and Blades of Steel, which were rather limited.
The SNES did get a version of this series on the next year, but without the NHL logo, so it was NHLPA 93, which had the teams and players, but none of the team logos. Starting with NHL 94 though, they had full license over teams and players since then.
The series started plainly enough, with exhibition mode and playoff mode. With the years they added shootouts, goaltending and full season follow-up. In more recent versions they give even more control and customization with character creation, team salaries balacing, trades and training of recruits.
NHL 09 is no exception to all of those and even more. The full roster of the American League even adds more depth as now you can 'Be a Pro' in the game mode of the same name. It allows you to get into the skates of a recruit, starting with the Merican League and working your way up toward the NHL. Your performances are graded, and each game results in experience points that can eventually be turned into stat increase.
In previous games you'd either get a set amount of points to distribute when creating your character, allowing you to maximize one aspect or another of your character. Another version gave you full control, but as a tradeoff made your base salary grow up exponentially, so evidently the team's max salary would be affected if you tried to play a season with it. The EXP system seems new and very interesting in many ways.
When playing Online, you use a similar system to the 'Be a Pro'. There is an exhibition mode that allows you to play 'the entire team' like previous games. Unless you locked yourself to a position you could use a button to switch to another player of your team. But in online Team Play, you only get to play your character at a single position, and get ratings as well, and eventually experience points to grew your stats. Unlike Be a Pro you're not limited to a single position, you can actually grow experience in both skaters and goaltending, due to being sometimes forced to play either.
I've got to play a few 6 on 6 games, and those are a blast online. When every player is controlled, if everyone is doing their position's work, the game is so much fun. But when you play with puck hoggers, it's bad. Sadly, I've had too many games where the 4 other teammates of my team had for only strategy to 'crash the net'. Literally, each time they had the puck they would ram the goalie and then hit everything hoping for a rebound. That doesn't work often.
The games I had with alot of passing to the defense at the point were fun. Passing the puck around really feels more like the ream thing, and simply shooting from every direction randomly simply doesn't work as well as you'd think. Yes the game allows for some rather stupid goals sometimes, but not often enough to make it worth shooting everytime you get the puck without passing and trying to either one0time it or have the goalie get out of position with a mistimed dive.
At any rate, if you like Hockey, online play and have a PS3 (or whatever, I think the online part is multi-console, not sure), look me up for a game sometime. I got a rental, but I'm pretty sure I'll buy this game now.
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