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Previous Next. ONE23 Member. Oct 27, 63 0 0. Thank you! JayPatel Diamond Member. Jun 14, 4, 0 0. MiniMe69 Senior member. Oct 12, 0 0. Why do u want the no-cd crack By the way Oct 10, 68, 3, Budman Lifer. Oct 9, 10, 0 0. If you own the game then it's ok.
Have a look here. The game was gritty and defensive and end-to-end in turns. It was also marked with a great three-point passing play between Doug Gilmour, Joe Thornton, and Steve Thomas that resulted in one of the prettiest goals I've ever notched. Then there was our great comeback against Calgary.
The Flames took a lead into the third, but Eric Lindros and Gary Roberts deflected point shots to tie the game. Lindros then scored his second off a nice feed from Derek Morris trade me, will ya? And I can't forget the blowlout of the Habs in Montreal where Ed Jovanovski laid seven big hits on the wimps wearing the blu, blanc, et rouge. If the real Maple Leafs perform as well as my fake ones this season, I'll be very happy next spring.
Yet NHL is not perfect. As enjoyable as the end product is, there are some aspects of gameplay that just can't be adjusted satisfactorily with the sliders. Perhaps the most annoying issue regards line changes. Players on the "wrong" side of the ice from their bench often get trapped out there, refusing to head off unless the puck is fully iced. This isn't that noticeable if you leave Fatigue set at the default 3, but if you bump this up to 4 so that teams can't give their top two lines upwards of 30 minutes a game, these caught players run out of gas in an obvious fashion, very quickly.
I eventually gave in and turned Fatigue back to 3. Defensive positioning is still pretty rough and ready. Some of the best defensemen in the league, with Defensive Awareness ratings well into the 80s, will often scramble around. They'll go to the same man, part like the Red Sea allowing forwards to go straight up the middle, or simply stand around at the blueline.
This latter issue is the biggest problem with defensemen in the game. Computer forwards will blitz right by you if you're not very careful when choosing to take over control of the blueliner or notsometimes it's best to leave well enough alone.
At the other end of the ice, the computer-controlled defensemen will often back away from larger forwards. Eric Lindros, for example, can usually put his head down and barge right to the crease, with the obliging defender backing up all the while. Soft computer goals are also frustrating.
Even with Goalie Boost maxxed out, an average of one or two will float by your netminder every game or two. This could be marked down to goalie fatigue, but even then it doesn't make sense because good starting goalies aren't this inconsistent even when they play five or six games in a row.
Fighting is flat-out terrible. Two combatants simply square off and begin punching each other in the face as quickly as possible. Hit the necessary button fast enough and you'll be rewarded with a win and a momentum meter boost.
This can be pretty tough, however, as the computer pugilists throw 'em pretty quickly. Also, all players who will fight are rated fairly similarly in terms of how many punches they can take. Seeing Dave Manson get schooled by Kirk Muller despite landing five or six solid rights to the former Hab captain's beak was almost more than I could take.
The computer won't win any awards for the General Manager skills it demonstrates in season play. While it stops well short of giving players away, some values don't reflect reality.
Youth and potential mean very little to the AI. It rates current ability and holes that need to be filled before making a deal; nothing else. At the same time, nobody had any interest in super-prospect Nik Antropov, who'd certainly be worth more in the real world open market than any of the three players that I did move. You can't use these holes to poach true stars, though. Of course, if you're patient and dedicated to running a career for the full ten years, the best way to go would be to pile up youngsters for next to nothing.
That should get you a Cup contender within three seasons. In the meantime, though, anyone want a big kid from Kazakhstan? A far more serious problem is the game's current lack of stability. I've experienced a number of hard locks and drops to the desktop in menu screens and between periods. Irritating, but not unexpected in this day and age.
But I also had a season file corrupted after 26 games. The program locked up on the main season screen after finishing a game with Pittsburgh and attempting to simulate the following match-up with the boring Capitals.
All further attempts to get back into this season resulted in drops to the Windows desktop. Only knowing that none of the other reviewers currently playing the game has experienced this makes me comfortable enough to award the game a Silver. You've been warned. My advice would be to back up those precious season data files every five games or so.
While it's taken some space to detail what's wrong with NHL , nothing I've noted abovewith the obvious exception of the season-destroying crashhas discouraged me from playing the game.
It's actually pretty reassuring that I can afford to be so nit-picky. In past years, I could have summed up the flaws with broad strokes, simply noting that the defense was broken or that it was impossible to score with just so many words. And I remain hopeful that everything is minor enough to be fixed in the inevitable patch. New standards have been set for computer sports games where presentation is concerned.
No sports title on the market looks as good as NHL Faces are easy to distinguish at a mere glance. Aside from rookies, there couldn't have been more than five or six players I didn't immediately recognize. Some are downright perfect. It's truly some of the most impressive artwork I've ever seen in a game. And that's before they yap at the referee with comments synched to the movement of their lips. Animations are quite good, too, though not completely natural.
Skating remains a little too locomotive-like to truly depict NHL calibre skaters. Goalies have a whole new set of movements this year. They'll flop if they get too far out of position, glance behind them on hard shots, and sometimes just be taken aback by a blast that came at an unexpected time.
Shots and passes are always a little bit off. The game is obviously not based on physics, as occasionally passes will miraculously end up on the sticks of players who weren't where they were when the pass was released. Slow motion replays of goals reveal the close-in action to be just a bit out of whack. None of this will affect your enjoyment of the game, though it does reveal the creakiness of the engine.
A number of scenes have been added to fill the time between drops of the puck. Wingers will jostle for position at the side of circle, a center will give instruction to a defenseman, someone will skate up to tap the pads of his goalie, and so on. My favorite has to be the way that little scrums often result in one player hacking at the back of an opponent's knees. That's perfectly in tune with real hockey, and had to have been added by someone on the design team who's spent a lot of time on the ice.
These little episodes also often end up with the captains or alternates getting a lecture from the referee by the penalty box door. Audio has been toned down The hits and slapshots from last year's game that sounded more like blasts from a BFG than anything you'd hear in a real hockey game have been cut back.
I can't really say the same for play-by-play man Jim Hughson and color commentator Bill Clement. Hughson's added more specific comments to his repertoire this year, with notes about previous games and performances in season play, but he gets very repetitive if you're playing with the same team a lot. I've heard him make the same observation about the points accumulated by Joe Thornton during his last year in junior at least two dozen times now.
Clement just sounds like a gladhanding insurance salesman to me. The only reason I don't shut the gruesome twosome off is that Hughson occasionally chimes in good advice about line changes. As a last note about the audio, I have to say that the designers did a fantastic job with the soundtrack this year. The Collective Soul tune that kicks off the opening cinematic, and the various songs that accompany menu browsing, do a great job of pumping up the gamer.
There's also an option to customize the in-game music that fills breaks in play with your own MP3 files. I've admittedly been guilty of overestimating NHL series games in the past. And even last year I was possibly a bit too positive because NHL was a fair bit of fun, particularly after the patch. I don't foresee any regrets over what I've written here about NHL This is a great game that walks the fine line between arcade action and true simulation.
It serves hockey fanatics as well as Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball serves followers of the American national pastime. This one is a keeper. Screenshots from MobyGames. Jlnhlfan -1 point. To add to that, the game is trying to tell me that it can't detect DirectX 7, even when it's installed.
Jlnhlfan -2 points. I got an error saying that there are no mountable file systems when I tried to mount the ISO file.
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