First off let me say I am a long time supporter of EA's NHL series, started with nhl93 on the snes and switched over to pc only since 95.
Now for my view on this years outing... ATROCOIUS, this year's game is a total money plug and nothing else, for the first time I felt like my money would have been better served bieng flushed down the toilet. Lets start the analysis (game played on high difficulty with tweaked sliders to try and up the difficulty):
Good:
Better sound than previous years (less distortion)
Great skating animations
Bad:
Utterly useless goaltending, this is my biggest gripe.. why on earth did ea revert to the terrible goaltending of years past? 2003-2004 were examples of bad goalie ai but this years version takes the cake, goalies flopping all over the ice allowing way too many goals, Cheap easy to exploit goals are commonplace this year (one timers pretty much always go in both by me and the computer opponents, wraparounds same deal, rushing the net and cutting across the crease same deal). I mean when set to 5minute periods and the score is 6-3 after the first in my favour something is just wrong, and I have no trouble potting an average of 5-6 goals per game.
Utterly useless defensive ai, no longer does the cpu controlled ai on your team actually try to help you out at all.. they always just stand around looking stupid, not to mention the opposing teams defence that also stands around letting you manouver endlessly in the offensive zone.
Totally absurd bugginess, where to start on this one.. oh wait lets see, them saying they support the Saitek P880 only to find it has major control issues in the game (the demo showed this same prob, but was not fixed for the retail version) wherein the only workaround is to manually edit a registry key that tricks the game into thinking the saitek is a "Logitech Dual Action". Now onto the main menu that absolutely will not show up unless you have Vsync set to ON, and couple that with a new ice surface that causes severe hitching issues ( I may get blasted on this one but I've tested thoroughly: fraps reports a solid 60fps during gameplay yet the game hitches constantly, adjustment to all the visual sliders has shown that no setting causes this but the on ice arena detail, turning the setting down 1 notch to where the ice trail that stays for all of 2 seconds when a player turns is OFF and the game all of a sudden runs smooth as glass). Also the graphics are just about the same as last years version, allthough this year's player models look way too stocky (especially the bigger players).
Well, that is my view on this years outing from ea sports.. to me they totally dropped the ball on this years version and have left a sour taste in this 13 year dedicated customer.. each year since 2003 the pc versions seem less and less polished compared to thier console bretherin and this years version is the absolute worst of them yet. I will be sticking with nhl2005 this year as I believe it is a much better game in almost every aspect, and I remain steadfast in my beliefs that both ea and 2k sports should have done the right thing by not releasing a hockey title this year and having a 2 year developmental cycle to revamp thier graphical engines ai systems and control schemes rather than just rehashing pretty much the same game they have been making with minor tweaks bolted on.
If you read the whole post cudos to you... sorry it was so long but I just needed to get all this off my chest.
nothing happened...i wanna see what Sydney Crosby is rated 
