Video Game Review: NHL 10

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Video Game Review: NHL 10

POSTED: Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 4:07 PM

Filed Under: Video Games

It's game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, halfway through the third period. The Flyers and I are down 3-1 to the Red Wings. It's desperation time. We need goals fast or everything we've worked for all season long will have been for nothing.

And then the coach sends in Riley Cote. For a three-minute shift.

WTF?

Like all of its ancestors, NHL 10 (EA Sports) takes great pains to simulate the swirling chaos of professional hockey in video game form. They recreate the real world arenas, map the players' faces and assign ratings for everybody on just about everything (shot power, aggression, etc.). This year's evolutionary steps includes that thing players do where their arms are tied up so they kick the puck along the boards, and more realistic post-whistle shoving matches.

Things have come a long way since Sega 94, when Jeremy Roenick's shot was unstoppable and Pavel Bure could deke the pants off an entire team. These days the great players are still great, but they're not gods. And, thanks to some kinda A.I.-ish function, opposing teams' defenses can adapt to your playing style. There are some moves that work, but there's no The Move that always equals a goal.

But there are still those dumbass moments that do not resemble real hockey in the slightest. ...

Like Riley Cote taking the ice in any kind of relevant post-season moment. Or a winger dumping a puck into the corner instead of firing it on net during the waning seconds of a third period. Or a center eschewing the opportunity to saucer pass to a charging teammate in favor of rocketing the puck some 200 feet along the boards to his own defensive end.

These things have always happened, counter-instinctual anomalies, stupid idiosyncrasies, bizarre glitches in the matrix that remind you, yeah, this ain't real hockey.

But whatever. If you wanted to play in the NHL, you shoulda been born in Ontario and skated out of the womb. And NHL 10 has enough settings options ' including line changes controls to prevent Riley Cote from popping up where he doesn't belong ' to help smooth out some of the rough spots. And of course it looks amazing, with smooth-ish gameplay simulations. (Still has that bizarre unblinking zombie-pig facial amalgamation when you see a player up close. It's funny.) Unfortunately, like NHL 2K09, this game assumes you've got some kind of monstrous HD plasma death star screen; the clocks, the scoreboards and everything else appear so tiny on my average-sized TV screen as to be utterly unreadable. Seriously. I have to pause it to check the score. Eh, you get used to it.

I ended up losing the Cup, and I blame it entirely on my virtual coaches in whom I entrusted my shift changes. But, to be honest, I really didn't deserve to be a world f. champion yet anyway. Game 1 of the Finals was also game one of my NHL 10 career. There's no sense in being too realistic.

Posted by Patrick Rapa @ 4:07 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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