Well this certainly isn’t the first time a professional sports team is using a video game to scout for talents. Chelsea or Arsenal or whomever (I forget) used FIFA and Winning Eleven series before. But this is the first time a major league team in the North America to employ a video game.
Houston Rockets, as long as you don’t trade Yao I will always love your incompetent management team.
And it’s out!
NHL 09 came down the wire last night and I picked it up almost immediately. EA finally fixed the relative aiming! Now when the team goes down (Away in 1st and 3rd period or Home in 2nd period) you don’t need to aim backwards anymore. This has been a long time feature in the 2K series but EA never quite got it right. No matter how good last year’s hockey game was, the Home team almost always had an advantage, unless of course you force camera angle the way you want it. I considered it an unfair advantage since the movement to aim corners for the team going up required less distance to travel on the joypad.
The updated features are nice! I briefly went over the Be A Pro mode and it is quite good. EA made NHL almost seem like a RPG game. I’m definitely drafting myself into the AHL team and play through the AHL seasons to level myself up. I wonder if I have to be in Dynasty mode in order to do that though. Would be nice if I can do it in exhibition games.
The defense is much better, checks respond better and poke check isn’t nearly as annoying and actually requires you to aim. I didn’t use the lift stick button a whole lot. But it should be a nice move when you’re chasing from behind and don’t want to get a hooking penalty. I wonder what else I could have used it for? Someone that plays pro hockey please school me on this.
Offense is not exactly the same old. Deking is slightly harder, you need to be more precise on your movement. Shooting is different as if you’re not hitting up or down precisely, you’d get a imprecise shot. But sometimes if you don’t aim precisely and shoot imprecisely then you get a combined precise shot! It’s a luck of the draw for my at the moment as I only had the chance to play 2 games. Maybe when I get more seasoned it would come more naturally.
I haven’t checked out the other modes yet, but I’ll update on the rest later. Maybe they’ll allow shorter seasons for once? I didn’t hear anything about it in previews so I don’t expect it to be a feature.
I did notice the Historical teams selection in the preview videos. You can be the best Montreal Canadiens ever assembled. It’s pretty awesome.
EA shrunk the EA Sports’ NFL Madden 09 release platforms and excluded PC. Too bad for the sole PC gamers. Joyce everyone else because this means less efforts will be spent on porting horrible previous generation Madden builds and more will be spent on refining the current generation builds.
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