NHL Hitz 20-02

Boom, baby! I just finished the final hockey game in the 50-game "Midway Cup challenge," winning the cup in convincing fashion, so I'm calling this game beaten. I had a lot of fun with it, mostly with friends playing right alongside me. I started the franchise mode at home back in June with some friends. We made ourselves as hockey players on our own custom team. For a logo, we chose some kind of flaming wolf. Naturally, we named our team the "Hot Dogs." Laughs ensued, but they soon gave way to a sneaking suspicion that we had a pretty lame team. After a two-game losing streak, we decided it was time for a new image, and rebranded ourselves altogether. Using some of the reward points we had earned, we entered the hockey shop in search of some new heads. You know: ponies, snowmen, soldiers, zombies, aliens, pirates. Nothing too crazy. We settled on sharks, and picked uniforms to match. I forget which one of us the pun came to first, but we called our team the "Sealers" - you know, like the Whalers, and the Steelers of football. Because sharks eat seals. Hilarious! Right? At any rate, our season really took off from there, and we rattled off another ten wins or so with ease. But then we stopped playing the game for some reason. I blame the quest for personal statistics. On our team, we had a center, a winger, and a defenseman, and we tried too hard to play into our own characters' niches. Our center always shot the puck, rather than setting up decent plays, because he really wanted to set a scoring record. Our defender just spent the whole game checking the opposition, racking up his "hits" count. Our winger struggled to find a role on the team, alternating between trying to play defense and trying to set up our center. He (I) ended up atop the leaderboard only in assists and fights. Still, things were working; we had our roles, and stuck to them. But as the games got harder and harder as the season progressed, our team only got worse and worse. Our center, frustrated by the fact that goals became harder to score, only took more and more shots on net to compensate, instead of finding the open man or setting up a one-timer bid. Our defender became complacent just to keep on checking opponents, and never really aided in our attack but still rarely found himself playing good defense. Our winger became all the more irritated by his (my) teammates' lack of discipline, and just complained about their sloppy play. With 35 games or so to go, we gave up on the game once and for all one night, putting it away for the summer. Enter autumn. Now, here at my apartment on campus, two roommates joined the quest for the Midway Cup. They made themselves and signed with the Sealers. As we won more games and earned more attribute points, they began to boost all of their statistics concurrently, rather than concentrating on a few areas. At first, I protested. I told them we needed dedicated attackers and defenders. But I was wrong. We three played each game with no predetermined roles whatsoever. And we just kept winning. Sure, we lost a few games here and there, but only early on. In fact, I think we ended the season on a 15-game winning streak, and with all of our starting skaters' statistics maxed out. Sometimes both roomies joined me for a game; sometimes it was just one. Hell, I played five or ten games alone. It didn't matter. We just kept winning. We dabbled with a few codes that did some silly things such as make our heads bigger or award goals to the winners of fights. We even started to use the "infinite turbo" code excessively. It's not like we needed it; we won even when we didn't use it, even in the final games. The code just made the games more fun and higher scoring. Anyway, earlier tonight, as I've already mentioned, we took home the Midway Cup. Game over. Game beaten. Game very thoroughly enjoyed. I really love NHL Hitz 20-02 (and that's pronounced "twenty-oh-two"). Other arcade-style sports games like Blitz, NBA Jam, and EA's Street series all seem far too over the top. But Hitz was aided, if anything, by the absurdity; while simulation-style series like Madden and Live are the best out there for their respective sports, I have never played a hockey game, sim-style or otherwise, that I've enjoyed half as much as Hitz 20-02. Go Sealers!