[davep]

Quote: Originally Posted by The Visualizer

FIRST IMPRESSIONS Just played 3 Battle for the Cup games (All-Star/Hardcore). I pretty much echo everyone else's impressions. Hardcore Passing is great, gonna take some getting used to to get the speed to the pass down pat. One thing that kind of bothers me is that you can't hold down the pass button for as long as you want like you could for saucer passes last year. Seen a good number of passes that I thought I aimed pretty good not received by my teammates, I think you gotta really take into account which side of your teammate you want to pass it to, not just right at them. A.I. did some nice one-on-one dekes when I got a little aggressive with my checking similar to the one shown by Littman in the latest blog videos. I like how you can miss checks/pin to the boards because the warping is gone. Seen some new goalie animations that looked cool. CPU goalie (Osgood) seemed to have some difficulty handling the puck on more than one occasion. I like the improvements they made to the dump pass mechanics, gotta play around with it a little more as it seemed I could not float one high once I crossed center ice. The after the play stuff is cool, teams go a little wild when you mess with them. I wish they separated the buttons for face-washing & slashing/cross-checking so I didnt do some heinous stuff by accident. Gonna start targeting star players and see if I can get them off the ice. I really like the fighting, its pretty well done, theres some room for improvement as its still a little wide open, needs to be more clutching/grabbing at least in some of them. Loving the new placement of the push-puck button (LT), wont be doing accidental saucer passes no more now. I tried skating towards guys using the pass block button (LB) and my guy didnt face up correctly like Litty said they would in the latest blog video. Will have to play around with this more to see if maybe Im doing something wrong. Like someone said already stick-lifts dont seem automatic anymore which is great news as it was abused last year. I noticed my CPU defenders did a poor job of defending the cross crease passes, they seemed to react like they did in 09 despite what the blog videos showed. Gotta play a little more and see if this is really the case. Like someone else said they act weird in the neutral zone, constantly turning around when you dont let them carry over the blue line. They do this at least twice before trying to dump it if you have everything defended well. On a good note, CPU D did do a good job of pinching me as soon as I crossed the blue line on a lot of occasions causing turnovers that wouldn't have happened last year. Board play is everything its cracked up to be. Littman talked about it like it was 1 option you could use to play a dump & chase style. Well he is a damn liar, because its gonna be absolutely essential to master this and use it often if you want to win this year no matter what strategies you use. Lastly, the puck physics are awesome, lots of strange redirections of skates and sticks like they showed in the blog videos.

Nice write up, thanks! So the cpu D is aggressive in the neutral zone and there's not as much up and down?