PS3 - NHL 08 - Dynasty Save Problems, Load Problems, Problems with Simulating Games, Horrible AI = Bad game

So, now that I have my PS3 connected to my gorgeous monitor, I though I'd try out a game...NHL 08 - What else. In a hockey town such as Ottawa, lot of people at work have been talking about it.

So, Patrick (our new contributor) and I played it last weekend. The game was a disappointment for the most part. Both of us were really excited that we'd start a Dynasty Mode with the Ottawa Senators, and finish it by wining the Stanley Cup... and that's where the dream ended.

We fired up the game. The first pop-up said that Auto-Save mode was enabled by default, and that it would automatically save our progress. Alright, awesome. So, we created a Dynasty Mode 'Profile', played the first few games, then decided to take a break. Since Auto-save was on, we'd be able to pick up where we had left off. Nope! When we loaded up the profile again, nothing was saved, and we were back again, at the beginning of the season with a record of 0-0-0. What??

So, we though we'd give that another try. We decided to simulate the games up to about December. BIG MISTAKE. It took about 5-10 minutes for the game to finish simulating the 15-20 games. The animation was choppy, it looked like it was freezing up, and having problems simulating. I remember playing NHL 98, on my Pentium II, and the simulation was blazing fast. I could simulate the whole season, and jump right into the playoffs within 30 seconds. This is completely unacceptable. Also, while the choppy simulation is running, there is an option to press the Triangle button, to stop the simulation, but that does nothing.

So, after we noticed all these problems we figured there would be some sort of update from EA Sports. I went to the online section, and surely enough there were 8 patches waiting for me to download. Downloaded, installed, restarted the game...and nothing. The Dynasty mode still wouldn't save anything.

There was also a roster update, which contained a patch, which apparently fixed the Dynasty mode save issue. Nada! Instead that update, made all the load times a lot worse. Now the game seems to freeze up for about 20 seconds during the initial load, then come back to life. I noticed all the other load times increase as well. Another problem is that after you finish and end a game, the screen goes black for about 10-12 seconds. That patch broke more things that it fixed.

As for the AI, sometimes it sucks, sometimes it's a super-star. No consistency. The AI for the team that I play on always seems to suck, they are never in the right place, even after I setup the strategies, but the AI for the computer team is always in the right place at the right time, right in the slot.

Come on EA, maybe the NHL franchise games don't see well in the States and else where in the World, but the people who do buy/rent; we deserves a good product, even if it's not a big seller in the US market.