Wednesday 22 August 2012

What's new to NHL 13

      It's almost that time of year again, Ea sports is set to release it's latest edition,NHL 13. Well we still got a little less than 3 weeks to go. But in the mean time we are given the NHL 13 demo to pass the time and drool over the newest features and modes for this year.I got the opportunity to play the demo briefly today and overall I was pleased. Here's what I found.

       New realistic skating- Probably the most noticeable new gameplay feature is the skating. EA has developed a more realistic way to skate which for me is great. In previous years it was hard to get breakaways and odd man rushes because the defencemen could always skate the same speed both forwards and backwards but not this year. Players now will stop and take a second to turn their body and start skating in the opposite direction starting from a near stop. This is great fun if you have a fast player like Phil Kessel and you can catch a defenseman flat footed. Good on EA for finally fixing this problem.

      New modes- The two new modes that appear in the demo are NHL live moments and GM connected mode. I'll start with the NHL live moments mode, I think this is a fun mode for when you don't want to play a full game. In this mode your job is to recreate history. The demo has only one objective and that is to recreate game 5 of the 2012 western conference finals, more specifically the end of that game. Your goal is to score in overtime as the L.A Kings eliminating the Phoenix Coyotes .I can't wait to see what else we can recreate!The next new mode is gm connected. This feature allows you to be the gm of your favourite team just as be a gm mode but the twist is instead of trading with a computer you can now trade with up to 29 of your friends. You can play full seasons against friends all while calling the shots. I personally can't wait for this mode, it's the ultimate fantasy league!
      
      New rating system- NHL 13 has also come up with a new player rating system. Now I only got to examine two teams (Kings and Devils) and I found the ratings to be pretty bad, Martin Brodeur for one is only rated at 82, I know he's old and at the end of his career but come on he is one of the best goalies of all time and he did help his team get to the Stanley cup finals. I think they could have done a little better. There are more examples of bad ratings but I'll let you examine them for yourself. ( check out Sykoras rating,69 ouch)

       What is not so new- Now with all the new modes we can expect lots of things to be the same as last year. I found that the faceoffs and the hitting were the same as last year as well as in between faceoffs all those graphics are basically the same. I really haven't played to much to find more similarities but I'm sure there's a bunch and that's fine as long as EA steadily improves each year and this year...they have.

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