Morale and team chemistry are also important – you need to keep players happy and remove bad apples off the roster as soon as possible. Ice time, line position, teammates, team standings, and personal performance factor into how happy a player is.

Fatigue also plays a huge role in the game, in Franchise Mode anyway; in fact the game has the best fatigue model around because it doesn’t feel cheap and you can see the effects of a tired team. Scratching players when they need rest is crucial and it forces you to use your entire team and not depend on stars every night. Speaking of stars, the players play to their ratings extremely well (outside of the crazy checking). Controlling the puck with a poor handler isn’t going to work; good passers get through traffic easier, good defenders intercept more passes and scorers shine when they get the chance. It makes for an unpredictable game, and is the biggest selling point to this year’s game – you never know how your team is going to play due to morale, fatigue, and the match-ups. It’s not uncommon to win a game on Tuesday 5-1 and come back and play a different team with different personnel and lose 5-0. That sort of variety is rare in today’s sports games.

It’s also important to note that out of the box the game doesn’t play too well. You absolutely need to adjust the game settings in order for it to play a moderately realistic brand of hockey. You can download other players’ game settings off Xbox Live and this is highly advised because otherwise it plays a surprisingly arcade brand of hockey (it’s easy to speed burst around the rink like Bugs Bunny on rocket skates), but with the right tweaks you can get it to perform much better than the default settings.

The game looks good—not great, but serviceable. Clearly if you demand the best looking hockey game around then EA’s NHL 08 is the game to get, but NHL 2K8 certainly gets the job done. The weakest part of the visuals is the player faces which look somewhat odd and even ghastly at times. The animations, especially the goalie animations, make up for it, though. Goalies flop around like a fish out of water and it’s thrilling to see him slide out of position off a rebound and dive back to try and make a stop. The goalies look fantastic as a result.

The commentary doesn’t deserve much mention other than the duo pronounces a lot of names wrong. After a while the play by play just because background noise. The crowds are awful, however. They chant like a group of Byzantine Monks. What’s worse (although pretty funny) is that the commentators even say how loud and “into it” the crowd is during one of their lonely chants of “Go Jackets!” It’s like Harry Doyle in Major League, telling the radio listeners to “listen to this crowd” only to hear silence. This is an area where the franchise needs a major shot in the arm. Hockey games are exciting and the crowds get extremely loud in certain arenas and this isn’t reflected at all in the game.

That said, if you do enjoy the game and get used to they controls NHL 2K8 has a ton of staying power in part due to the online league features but also because of its first rate franchise mode. Not only does it have the Collective Bargaining Agreement goodies intertwined in its contract setup, but it also has a cool negotiation feature where you play cat and mouse with a player’s agent, trying to find the sweet spot in order to sign him. In addition you have to bid on players during the free agency period – you no longer get your pick of the litter. You have to fight (and pay) for your free agents. Another nifty free agent feature is that each player looks at the situation on each team. Just because the Blue Jackets offer a top tier free agent more money than say, Detroit, doesn’t mean he’ll automatically sign for Columbus. There are many other factors involved. (In this case, the Jackets being a bad team.) It’s small things like this that help make franchise mode special and should keep fans of the game playing season after season.

The draft is now a lot easier to do as 2K took out the cumbersome scouting model and now simply lets you see the players (not their ratings but enough info to give you an idea.) Rookies tend to be rated a bit too high, though, as most first round picks range around 77 to 82 overall, which is easily enough to make an NHL roster without any time in the minors.