NHL 2000

What NHL2K Does:

I load the game up, go into exhibition, and it's Dallas vs. Buffalo. Having carefully nurtured a hatred for Brett Hull since the days when he decided to play hockey for the US instead of Canada (OK, baseball, football, basketball - those I understand, but *hockey*?! I hate him.)… anyway, that long standing, deeply implanted hatred absolutely forbid playing for Dallas (nevermind the fact that they beat Edmonton…), so Buffalo was my choice - I was just so eager to kick Hull's ass that I forgot to change my team to Edmonton. Oh well - Hull got his licks.

That's right, get close to the glass!

You can tell Jakub hates Brett Hull

After a *gasp* exciting game (not seen since the days of NHL 98), I took a look at the score, shots on goal… double checked that I did indeed play 20 minutes/period, and yes, it was accurate. The time passed by damn fast too - I must've really gotten sucked into the game … or did I?

No, I didn't. You see, EA did a really, really stupid thing. In previous games when a period was set to 5 or 10 minutes, the clock would show 5 or 10 minutes. This produced some anomalies, since if a goalie let in 5 goals over a match that had 3 periods of 5 minutes, his goals against average would be 20! That's because to reflect the possibility of goalie changes, the NHL series uses 60 minutes as the length of a game… and 3 periods of 5 minutes each adds up only to 15 minutes… therefore if he was in goal only 15 minutes and let in 5 goals, that means over 60 minutes, he would let in 20 (so the calculations go.)

Another face plant on Hull

Jakub on the Oilers?

Perhaps to solve this problem, EA decided to have 20 minutes on the clock for every period, but make the time go proportionately faster - ie, if you set the time to 5 minutes/period, then time would go by 4x as fast.

Great idea, right? Wrong - this is because one of the key elements of hockey is penalties. If you take a penalty, you either sit 2 or 5 minutes in the penalty box (with a possible game misconduct etc. also being handed out, though those don't actually mean that your team is stuck with 1 less player for the rest of the game.) Anyway, so you're sitting your 2 or 5 minutes in the penalty box… now, what if you want to play each match very quickly? You want to get your season done and over with, using the most realistic statistics possible (20 minute periods will produce insane goal and shots on goal totals.) Well… don't ever expect to get a powerplay goal. A powerplay occurs exactly when one team has the 'man advantage', which means the other team is penalized. The penalized team tries to kill off the penalty by wearing down the clock, and the powerplay team is obviously trying to take advantage of their extra numbers. Of course, if time goes by 4x as fast on the 5 minute setting, you'll only have 30 real time seconds to score the goal. Good luck!

Change settings

17 minute periods

Still, the one cool thing about this feature is that you can choose to have 17 minute periods or 9 minute periods - it's all adjustable on a slider, not a choice between 5, 10 or 20.