[adayinthelife]

I've played 3 periods so far and these are my first thoughts:

Authentic puck size and puck shadow = FINALLY. I have no idea why this took so long to implement on consoles (it used to be in the old pc versions) but I'm so glad it's finally here. It sounds minor, but it's just so to play with a puck that isn't the size of your players face.

Sticks - I have only seen 1 broken stick thus far which is good (it was on a hit) and I've been seeing a decent amount of players just straight up losing their sticks, which is awesome. The amount of times you see a stick break on a big hit vs a player just losing his stick is pretty slim and I was worried this wouldn't translate well, but it has.

AI - Now, I haven't played NHL 10 in a few months, but the AI does seem to be quite improved especially on the offensive side. I've been deked on rushes!

Goals - I've seen 4 goals, all of which were different. I've scored on a straight wrister and a tip in, while the AI has scored on a rebound and a nice deke(!) by Kane.

Hitting - I'm not as pumped about this as a lot of you guys seem to be unfortunately. While it is light years ahead of the animation based checking from previous years, it still feels pretty clunky and there are quite a few questionable hits. The good news is that no, not nearly every hit is a big hit (even at these default slider settings), but I really don't know how the physics are working on some, I'm just finding players don't react to hits from certain angles as you would expect them to. Also as far as the "every hit is different" idea that we've been hearing about, that's just simply not true. In my limited experience thus far I've seen several hits that if not identical, were very similar. Most of this seems to lie in the player who got hit and their reaction once they hit the ice - perhaps this is where the "real time physics" cut out?

Puck physics - Much like the hitting the puck physics are improved, but really not that different than 10. Maybe I need to spend more time with it to see or maybe we'll just have to wait for retail to dick around with some sliders.

Overall I'm quite pleased and SUPER eager to learn more about Be a GM. On the surface this is still the same game which will probably let down a few people and is also probably one reason for the lack of gameplay vids thus far. You really do need to play it to see the difference - it really does feel like a new game when you have the controller in your hand.