You can’t judge a book by its cover, but they never said anything about games. Which is good because with Rick Nash on the cover of NHL 2k9, I’m buying some version of it no matter what. But I digress, as this is supposed to be about my impressions of the game, not my man crush of the player who could be the MVP of the 08-09 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

The intro: The animation sequences and voiceover work are very nice, as are the video segments overlaid onto the ice during the pre-game.

Game play Graphics/Animations: The players almost have a bit of a cell-shaded quality to them, as if Visual Concepts (the games developer) said “let’s remind everyone this is a video game and not a hockey simulation”. I’m not sure if I like the way they’re drawn or not yet. The skating, shooting, stick-blocking, and goalie animations are particularly nice, but the contact animations (anytime a player hits the boards or another player) seem lacking. Maybe they weren’t done when they finished coding the demo, but right now it looks every time players make contact that they’re both going to apologize and say they didn’t see each other coming, because that’s how it looks. Also, you can’t really tell the difference between the relative sizes of players. Granter, neither Pittsburgh nor Detroit (the only two teams in the demo) are what you would call bigger teams, so maybe when Boston’s Zdeno Chara is on screen there will be a noticeable difference.

Controls: With the obvious success of EA’s skill stick addition to the NHL 200X franchise, it was only a matter of time before 2k got on board.  Unfortunately, 2k has chosen the name “Pro Stick Evolution” for the new control setup that uses the left analog to control player movement, and the right analog to control the stick. I know they had to avoid copyrights, but that’s not the world’s best name. The nice thing about it is that it works really well, so I can live with the name. Passing, shooting, blocking, dekeing, and the rest of the standard hockey game moves work as expected on either the new or original controls. The hybrid control set wasn’t to my liking, but some may find it helpful in transitioning from the old to the new control systems.

AI: I know this is just a demo, but I’m a bit concerned about the defensive AI in this game. I should not be able to skate right up the middle into the high slot and shoot on the goalie without one or both defenders moving in to take me out. Maybe they have the defense dumbed down so players can learn how to shoot more easily, but from what I’ve seen so far, the games idea of defense is to have every player on the ice cram themselves into the very front of the goal crease and try to get the puck. I’ll be hoping this is just a basic subset of the AI that was still being completed. It’s a short demo, so it’s hard to see how much effect things like players getting tired, injuries, and penalties will have on the gaming experience.

Fun factor: The demo has a pretty short pickup time, and with the basic control set, I was able to start winning regularly against the AI opponent after the 3^rd game.  Additionally there is a special move modifier button that advanced players will want to try out.

Conclusion: The game looks promising, but I’ll want to take the full version for a spin on my Xbox 360 before I can give a definitive answer to the age old question: EA or 2k? One thing’s for sure; I’m going to give the Wii version of NHL 2k9 a try before I make my final decision. Hockey sticks are maybe the second best usage for the Wii Remote (behind lightsabres, and tied with golf clubs), and everyone I know who plays the NHL franchises has been waiting anxiously for a Wii version. Hopefully, NHL 2k9 will live up to its early promise.

I was grocery shopping tonight, when down the aisle came a woman in a small white and lime green outfit. It said "WiiFit" across the back. I stopped and talked to her for a couple of minutes,  and evidently Nintendo has contracted for some WiiFit demos in major metropolitan areas this summer. It's been on display at the Community Arts Festival, this weekends Jazz and Rib fest, and will be set up for the first 5 days of the Ohio State Fair. I know the WiiFit is old news to a lot of folks, but this will be my first hands on. I promised to catch up with her at the Fair on August 2nd, and maybe sooner if the fiance and I have time on our visit.

It'll probably never happen. It's a pipe dream but one that I hold on to. Capcom sees the detriment in not having it. But what if instead of having a handle for each console out there there was one unified service for online gaming? Instead of creating a PSN ID, a 360 Live Account, and distributing a friends code on the Wii we all had one single point where it held our online gaming information. We don't have to have separate friends lists separated by consoles and we can send messages across to each other no matter what machine they are playing on. Take it a step further and imagine playing Quake Wars: Enemy Territories with people on the 360, PS3, and the PC. All your statistics would be aggregated into one area no matter which platform you played on. Online football leagues would span across all platforms. You'd have a greater range of people to play against. The closest we've come to currently and in play right now are the few cross platform games of the Xbox 360 and the PC. Console makers will never go for it because they want to control the online capabilities of their machine. Unfortunatly, it's just a dream and will probably stay that way.

Walmart listed Super Smash Bros. for $20 and Haze for $30. Now any reasonable person would know these two are pricing errors and that there's probably a slim to no chance you'd get the two games for well below the regular price. Every store has a clause on their website stating they are not responsible for typos. So naturally a ton of people tried to order and naturally everyone's been canceled.  Not surprising, everyone's pitching a fit over the cancellation. I've been around long enough to know that you might get lucky and get something for well below normal price when you run into these things but chances are there will be a red flag thrown up by the enormous amount of orders placed and the company will cancel it. There's no reason to be upset, angry, or complain about it because back in your head you probably knew it wasn't going to come to fruition. There's no reason to try to see if there's legal action to be taken. You're trying to save $30 on a game. Is it worth all the trouble and fuss for $30? Granted Walmart could've handeled it a little better and issue an apology email stating it was a pricing error rather than just outright canceling the order but we are talking about Walmart here.

"This has way too many buttons" my sister said as she picked up my Xbox 360 controller.  "You've got a full keyboard [the chatpad], you've got these two buttons [triggers], these two buttons [bumpers], two joysticks, and these four buttons on the front".  My sister isn't the biggest gamer in the world but she and I did spend a lot of quality time on the Atari 2600 when we were growing up so here expressing such distress over Microsoft's Xbox 360 controller was a bit intereting.  I pointed out that she had missed the thumbpad and the fact that the joysticks could be pushed down for an additional button push which caused her to roll her eyes a bit.  Spying the Dualshock controller next on the end table she picked it up and repeated the fact that the controller just had way too many buttons for "normal" people to use.

This was a bit of a shock to me as my sister has a little bit of gamer cred (we both spent a lot of time with our Atari 2600 growing up and she played a mean game of Kaboom! back in the day) .I use both controllers on a nearly daily basis without any hesitance so this was something a bit unexpected.  While it pains me to admit it this does seem to lead some credence to Nintendo's philosophy of changing how people interact with the consoles.  Maybe we as hard core gamers need to realize that not everyone is used to the 10+ button controller and that the Wii and DS really are the way to bring in new gamers.  

We played a bit of Rock Band this weekend and that went over well.  After finally figuring out some of the timing issues we were rocking out in style with my sister and fiancee on lead guitar and bass respectively and myself banging away on the drums. This certainly re-enforces every tidbit I've read about the rise of casual gaming this year.  But the question is, do casual gamers become hard core gamers or does the road end once you get a Wii?  If it is a dead end then will the niche of hard core gamers get left behind in the race to bring new gamers into the fold or not.