JSamuel wrote:Thank you so much; this is just the info I was looking for! One of the things I'm frustrated about in NHL 09 is how difficult it is to get into fights. I've spent a lot of time trying, but I just can't start a fight. Would I have the same difficulty starting fights in NHL 04?
Also, that Mod you linked to looks much better than any of the mods I found for NHL 09.
No worries! I think there's a lot more enthusiasm behind modding
04 than
09, probably, given it's from an era where there was a little more innovation happening year-to-year. I honestly couldn't tell you about fights as I turn them off in most hockey games because I think fighting in hockey is stupid, but that's more of a hockey purist critique than a video game critique. I can definitely understand the appeal to a non-fan lol
If you're looking for hockey games where fighting is front-and-center, or at least prominent, I'd definitely recommend one of the aforementioned
NHL Hitz games (which were also EA and I think are running on a sped-up version of the early-2000s
NHL engine, ala what the
Arena Football games EA made did with the
Madden engine of the time; it's basically "What if
NFL Blitz, but hockey?"), although as I said, they are as broken as any hockey game has been re: one-timers (if you aren't familiar, a one-timer is where someone passes you the puck and you take a shot right on the passed puck, rather than handling it and shooting).
ESPN NHL 2K5 supposedly let you fight to your heart's content (I know those late-aughts
NHL games were kind of finicky with it; basically, it was very hard for a lesser member of your team to draw a good player on the opposing team into a fight, as this was once a common strategy to simultaneously get one of your crappy players sent off for five minutes along with one of the other team's best players; by then, a "best" player falling for such a tactic was considered kind of pathetic, and now fighting in and of itself is going the way of the Dodo in North American hockey)...
NFL 2K5 I could talk about until I dropped dead, but sadly, I never played
NHL 2K5.
If you're not averse to titles that are firmly retro,
NHLPA '93 has fights that are much talked about, perhaps in part because it was in the movie
Swingers, with Vince Vaughn saying he's going to "make Gretzky's head bleed" (of course, Gretzky generally never fought in real life, and so you couldn't actually fight him in the game). Never played it myself, or maybe I did, but if I did, it didn't make any mark on my memory. I think the game I probably played was
NHL '94, which I can't remember well enough to make any recommendation for or against.