Economy of Effort

I feel sorry for hockey video game fans that only have PCs.

I played some NHL 06 on my laptop today, to give the game a try. I used to be a big fan of EA’s NHL game on PCs around 2000-2001, and on the Super NES console before that. But recently, I have been playing Visual Concepts’ NHL2K game on the Xbox, as it has been the superior game.

That sure didn’t change this year.

EA’s NHL 06 is, in a word, intolerable. The game has regressed to the point of not being worth playing anymore. The biggest problem? Physics. The skating and puck physics are more horrible than I can put into words. The puck just “snaps” from destination to destination, as if it’s just warping. Even if you turn pass assist all the way down, it will still just snap from stick to stick at physically impossible speeds. The skating is just as bad. There’s no smooth, gliding physics to it. Instead, it’s very jittery, and players just kind of skitter about. There’s no grace, or even a good sense of speed. Players kind of get “sucked” into collision animations. The gameplay is just flat out a waste of time. I thought at first that maybe it was just the default settings that were the problem, and all it needed was some slider tweaking. Nope! The slider options are very bare-bones and even on their extreme settings, they make very little difference.

But the graphics are pretty. Oh, are they pretty. Hopefully the NHL2K games start to look like that on the Xbox 360. There’s a lot of great little touches to the game, which makes the broken state of the core game all the more tragic.

It amazes me just how terrible the EA NHL games have gotten. It’s like nobody developing them has ever seen a hockey game, and are working solely by rough description.

Don’t ever play it.

My experience with the Civilization games has been, to this point, limited. Derek was always a big Civ fan, but me, I only played a bit of Civ II on another friend’s computer. It was fun, but I didn’t REALLY get into it.

But with all of the exceedingly positive press Civilization IV has received, combined with the fact that I was wanting a nice turn-based strategy game for my laptop (and older ones like Alpha Centauri don’t support my laptop’s 1680×1050 widescreen display), I decided to drink the Civilization IV kool-aid.

I see what the fuss is about.

I became sold on the game when I coaxed the Egyptians to go to war with a French empire that had me hemmed in geographically, and was trying to strong-arm me. They warred for quite some time, but then the Russians declared war on Egypt too. Not long thereafter, Egypt declared peace with France so that they could deal with Russia… and they did it just before I was going to make my move against France. Unfortunate, but the length of the war allowed me to build and expand while the French were throwing resources into battle. Besides, the Russians were getting pissed at me too, probably looking to pillage my little colonies by their borders soon, but their war with Egypt will keep them busy.

And now it’s past 4:00am and I need to sleep. I didn’t think it was anywhere near this late.

Now I get it.