Mashing Buttons

Canada’s recent defeat of Team USA in the 2010 Olympic gold medal game on Sunday (Monday morning for me) was nothing short of nail biting. I managed to catch most of sudden-death overtime on a TV in my office’s lunchroom. It took a lot of effort to not punch the air in front of my colleagues when Crosby finally pushed the puck into Team USA’s net, securing the gold medal. And it reminded me that I could be living this sort of experience at home.

I picked up NHL 10 in January. I was full of memories of playing NHL ’97 on my SNES with a friend when we were fresh out of high school. All of these old hockey names were still in my head: Mats Sundin, Scott Niedermayer, Ed Belfour, Mario Lemieux… but a lot has changed since those halcyon days.

I was expecting things to be a lot more complex now than they were 13 years ago; they were. I’ve played about 10 games so far with the character I created – he plays centre and is supposed to be awesome when attacking the goal – and all I’ve managed is one assist. Not even a goal. I wonder if it’s me… to some degree it probably is. I don’t have the same prowess that I used to. Also, the game has all of these extra layers of control: I can deke, I can determine where in the net I want the shot to go, I can even choose the type of pass I use to get it over to another player.

But all I want to do is play some hockey.

I put the game down for a while after playing it for a few days; I’ve had other distractions (MAG, Bioshock, Rock Band 2, God of War Collection – for all of which I intend to write progress reports). Canada’s spectacular win at the Olympics has inspired me to get back into it, however.

There are some things I could probably tweak. I could turn the difficulty down to “Casual” from “Default” or “Normal” but for some reason that feels like cheating to me. Plus, there is actually a mechanism for changing the controls to the old NHL ’94 control scheme which is much simpler to operate but, I suspect, drastically reduces the level of control afforded to the operator.

In other words, I need to spend a bit more time with it. As someone who’s been out of the loop for a long time, however, it made me feel a bit old when I came back to it and so much had changed. Nonetheless, after seeing that awesome Canadian win, I’m looking forward to giving it another go – letting go of some of the hangups of the past and giving it a fresh go.

Sundin and Neidermayer are still there in NHL 10 (they’re now two of the oldest players in the game), so perhaps I’ll be able to re-assemble the old team and return to my late ’90s former glory.