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By Mark D, September 13, 2011 12:08 am

You might wonder why I’m talking about a game that’s over 3 years old and that I paid all of 6 bucks for. Well it still annoys me when sports games get stuff wrong. This game just hits a lot of points that will eventually push anyone playing it over the edge. I’ve found I can only play 2-3 games in a sitting due to the frustration. But I must finish things so that Dipietro can win a half dozen awards along with the Stanley Cup, and that Mike Comrie can be in the race for the Hart Trophy.

So what to start with? Expect to almost never score unless there is an awful goalie in net, and most starting goalies are rated too highly. This is another game that almost totally relies on your ability to convert one timers to actually score. The dings of hitting posts in 30+ shot games will start to haunt your dreams. To make matters even worse, when you get higher up on the difficulty, the computer becomes an expert at breaking up any passes in their defensive zone. Oh and it also gets really good at clearing the crease with some questionable interference level hits. So the few times the puck does reach where you are aiming, expect the puck to go through the space that used to contain the player.

To top it off, on higher levels the AI has quite the amazing ability to use three players to pin you in the zone, while your players have an amazing inability to get open. It gets even more fun when the AI breaks out, as the AI will eternally skate right up the middle, outskating your defensemen who are skating backwards. So your defense will proceed to turn around, but have no momentum, giving the AI a breakaway on nearly every turnover. You know how I mentioned that on the higher difficulty the AI is good at intercepting passes and clearing the crease? Expect the opposite from your AI defensemen.

You can also just about throw the ratings out the window. 2K seems to have decided that difficulty should mean a change of speed. As an example, on the Islanders my two fastest players are Milan Hejduk and Miroslav Satan. Yet as soon as I upped the difficulty, it’s impossible for those two to out skate ANYONE. I can pound on the speedburst button and maybe, maybe I’ll beat someone for long enough that they won’t stickpoke the puck away at maximum reach when I run out of steam. Also on offense, to get anything going you have to screw with the AI by stopping, doing a circle and then looking for someone open. Stopping causes the AI’s momentum to carry them forward for another step or two, and since your players are going to be slow, they’ll be open for a split second.

The hitting system is another joke. I can play as Bruno Gervais and destroy people, as long as I’ve got a head of steam going. Sure I’ve seen smaller guys bounce off bigger guys, but usually only when they don’t have a head of steam. There’s almost no reason to stick poke when its far easier to knock someone off the puck. What not to expect is some actual forechecking from your teammates. The second the puck is on the stick of an opposing player, your players will give up the zone without a fight. So if you amazingly manage to intercept the puck or take it back, expect to get beat down in a 4 on 1 situation as your players slowly make their way back to the zone.

I shouldn’t have the game on the second highest difficulty, have injuries to 4 of my top 6 forwards and still be winning 90% of the time. At one point my top line was Hejduk-Park-Hunter. Just to give you an idea of how many injuries that is, Richard Park is my 4th line center, and Petteri Nokelainen (who had 16 points in 60 AHL games in 07 which the ratings are based on) was my 2nd line center and 2nd PP Center with the callup from Bridgeport. If you remember Nokelainen at all, you know he should be nowhere near the NHL. Although he didn’t do it well, he still was good enough to be able to cover Crosby.

I am so sick and tired of sports games cheating in order to increase the difficulty. That’s one of the main reasons I am ranting about a near 3 year old game. I remember playing games of Madden in which I ground and pounded it for 3 quarters, had complete control of the game and a 14-0 lead. Suddenly everything would start going wrong and no matter how many people I threw into coverage, the AI would complete every pass. No matter how many blitzes I threw at the AI it always got the ball away just in time. It’s the same complaint here, difficulty shouldn’t mean having to cheat the system and that’s the biggest sin NHL 2K8 commits.

Also I should mention this is from me playing the PS2 version of the game.

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By Mark D, October 22, 2010 6:05 pm

I realize this is the second time this week I am taking it to Yahoo! But I blame Yahoo. They bought a news farm called “Associated Content” a few months ago. Now just to explain myself, a news farm is a site that exists solely to game the google system and bring in hits. Much maligned Bleacher Report does the same thing with sport stories. The stories themselves are secondary to getting hits and being the top search results on Google. Associated Content actually pays it’s writers as long as they can somehow manage to get the story over 400 words.

So today I stumble (as in at one point it was being discussed at 3 different places on Lighthouse Hockey) onto one of the first Associated Content posts for Yahoo! in the form of a “5 Reasons the Islanders Suck” post. Look, if there’s one thing I can deal with fine it’s being told the Islanders suck. If I was someone who defended Milbury, I might be a little delirious about the Islanders over the last 20 years. But I realize it’s been an awful run. So my problem isn’t with making fun of my team. I would have never gotten through my youth surrounded with Ranger fans if I let it get to me. The problem is that it is poorly worded, poorly researched and makes a mockery of the way Yahoo! sets up it’s teams pages.

Associated Content is by far (Oh and Salon agrees with me here) hardly better then any run of the mill blog. For the simple reason that most bloggers aren’t doing it to get paid, but because they have a passion. When you go to the team page on Yahoo, they separate news from Blogs (Like LHH, Puck Daddy and so on) from official or big news sites. So CBC.ca, The Montreal Gazette and The Canadian Press are all in a news feed. On the top of that news feed currently for the Islanders? The link to the Associated Content article. So for someone that doesn’t know any better it appears that Associated Content is a professional news organization.

With both Associated Content and Bleacher Report their abuse of Google above all else to get hits has got to be one of the most annoying things online. As they both succeed they are only going to make things worse for everyone else. More of these are going to spring up, spamming Google results with poorly written articles that have the right keywords. Shame on Yahoo! for buying Associated Content and giving them the same respect as any mainstream media. There’s easily an article almost everyday by 7thwoman or by Islanders Point Blank or even the NHL Arena website which is by far better then anything ever written by the people at Associated Content.

It’s a shameful day, as I really do feel that for the most part Yahoo! has a wonderful collection of news stories on any topic and to shoehorn Associated Content into the Yahoo news stream is a joke. It really brings down Yahoo when they have these Associated Content stories next to real stories. In the long run it also hurts networks like SBNation (yes I do realize I write there) which really does look for quality contributors. As it becomes more and more popular to game google so that your content will come up first, quality content from not just SBN but other news sites will be pushed further and further down the list. At the same time more companies will come around, and only care about search engine optimization and not the stories.

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By admin, August 30, 2009 2:14 pm

In some bad news this week, Mike Sillinger retired. I hate it when health takes the game away from a player whose as good as he is.So how does Mike Sillinger compare to the rest of his 89 1st round draft mates?

Total Games
Sillinger = 1049
89 = 9504 (an average of 475.2)

Total Points
Sillinger = 548
89 = 4480 (an average of 224)

Total PIMs
Sillinger = 644
89 = 10310 (an average of 515.5)

Total Teams Played for
Sillinger = 12
89 = 25 (Including Jets, Whalers and Nordiques in that count)

Double the average points and double the average games played. He was the man. I also like how 20 guys only managed to play for 25 different teams while he racked up 12. Goodbye Mike Sillinger, enjoy retirement.

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By , February 1, 2009 5:41 pm

As I mentioned in passing, my teams were always awful.  I always had a new coach every season, and half of them had a bad tendency to drink. When I was 9 or 10 the team was so bad that I was easily the best player on it. This is also where my luck comes in. Every team sent two players to the all-star game. One of them was going to be the no-talent coaches son, but the other one obviously had to be me. Well the announcement comes and somehow the catcher, who always threw the ball over my head at 3rd, was going to the all-star game. It was one of those great mysteries for me. At one point I mentioned it in passing and my mom thought I knew what had happened. The catchers mom was dating the coach, so thats how he got onto the all-star team.

So in 1994, my final season and the strike year, I was playing in the 13-15 divison. To begin with my league didn’t have a legal field we could play on. We could play in Miller Field, but there was no fences. So we ended up playing on the New Springfield fields. There were only 3 teams in the divison, and on my team there was 3 other thirteen year olds. Well my coach would only play us as DH, which I loved cause I hated playing the field anyway. So a month into the season the other two thirteen year olds have quit the team. I show up to practice and its just me and the coach at the field. To make it worse, the practice before that there was only three of us. He looks at me, and says “Hey Mark, you come out to every practice, every game, never complain, I’m going to call this practice, but make sure you show up to the next game.”

So that wensday I have a game, show up and look at the starting lineup and see that he has me starting in Right Field and batting at 9. At least Right Field was where I lined up, it might have been left field but I was so excited when I went out there I ended up in the wrong spot. So while we’re doing warmups it starts raining. Nothing much, and the last thing I want is this game to be cancelled. Well to top it off, it start hailing golfballs, and since I’m the last one back to the bench I can’t stand on the bench and get pegged by all the hail. After a half hour or forty five minutes they decide to call the game.

Well a few days later we get a call that they threw out my coach because he never played the thriteen year olds. Of course about four or five of the older kids quit so we forfeit the first two games back till we get a couple of new players. The new coach is the dad of one of the thritreen year olds, who was godawful. He was easily one of the worst players I had ever played with. Well I never started again for the rest of the season, and started yelling at the coach on a normal basis. His son would manage 8-10 errors a game while at second base. One time he was grounded from going to the game, and instead of having our normal 18 errors we only had 9, and when the coach mentioned this as being a bright side, I said to leave his son at home every game. This whole time I am barely getting anything more then half a game at a time, probably cause I shit talk the coach and his son constantly.

To make matters worse, after a few weeks all the older kids come back again. Suddenly we go from barely having 9 players a game to having almost 18. I have full games were I don’t even get to DH. I couldn’t care less, the games I don’t play the second half of I actually went into the stands and started booing my own team. At one game where we only had 8 players, I caught a line drive that was hit right towards me. The assistant coach was like “Wow Mark, where’d that come from?” and my answer was “If you ever let me play, maybe I could make some plays!”

The ending of the season was even worse. We were definitely the worse team in the league. We had to forfeit about 4-5 games during the season because we were short players. The playoffs were a one game playoff between teams two and three, and then a best of three between team one and whoever won the one game. Well we show up, have enough players and the other team for once didn’t have enough players. I start yelling at my coach and the umpire to start the game so we could win by forfeit. No one was nice to us during the season when all the insanity was going down, and I had never been in the championship games before. So I started ranting and raving that we should start the game. Well the douchebag coach decided to wait almost an hour, until it starts sprinkling so lightly it wouldn’t have cancelled a single game during the season, and allows the umpire to call the game due to rain. In the makeup game we go ahead 14 – 2, only to end up losing in a last two inning rally 21-16. I cursed and bitched at my coach like you wouldn’t believe, especially since I was on the bench, and that was the end of my little league career.