Back about 9 years ago my family received our first PC. I can’t remember much, but it was a shitty Packard Bell or something like that. At around this time I was a very big hockey fan, so my parents thought it would be a good idea to get me NHL ’99 for Christmas. I instantly fell in love with the game, playing it day and night. I later purchased both NHL 2000 and NHL 2001 for the PC the following years. I took a break from the PC side of the NHL series with the 2003 release, which I got for the PS2. Now NHL 2003 wasn’t a bad game by far, but it was just missing that feeling that the PC series always had.
I returned to the PC with NHL 06, and I fell in love all over again. I eagerly bought NHL 07 and…had to check to make sure I hadn’t loaded up 06 by accident. There were very few improvements, which left me dissapointed, yet I was still able to enjoy the game. I then purchased NHL 08…and yet again I received NHL 06/07 with minor improvements.
Now after this I came across a demo for NHL 09 on the 360, and wow, this was what I was waiting for. Amazing graphics/animations, an awesome control scheme, the new “Be a Pro” feature, this game had it all. This time I rented the game, knowing better than to put my full trust into EA Sports again. I brought the game home and began to play. Not long after starting the game, I was greeted with “Can’t read this disc. It may be scratched or dirty. Clean the disc with a soft cloth and try again.” So I followed the orders of my 360 and checked for scratches. No scratches, and oddly enough no dirt either. Still, I cleaned it and re-inserted it into my 360 hoping for the best. I managed to play for a little before, yet again, getting the same message. In frustration I hammered my inquery into google, hoping for a solution. I found that this had happened to many people, and for some cleaning the cache worked fine. So, I cleaned my cache and loaded up NHL 09 again. Guess what happens next, yeah, I got that god forsaken message again. It then donned on me that maybe saving the game to my HDD would work. Believing myself to be a genius I watched as it installed until about 37%, which is when I got the message again! This happened with every copy I tried, and I soon gave up. To this day EA Sports has still not released a patch of any sort to fix this problem.
So my question is, what the fuck EA Sports? I can understand the PC versions of the NHL series falling behind due to piracy, but why this? What is your explanation for shipping a large amount of broken games over 4 months ago, and still not having a patch? Why is it that you just try to ignore the problem as if it will go away? This is pathetic, I don’t know what you have planned for this coming September, but if it’s anything like the previous installment in the series, you will be losing a longtime fan. In fact, many longtime fans. I can’t be the only one.
The Gamers Den 