(continued from previous page) ...to play like it is meant to be played, with you in the arena. When the goalkeeper loses sight of the puck, slam that puck and hope for the best. Just know that the AI will perform as equally if not better than you with special moves, so be aware of your sightline and play form.

EA not only made the AI believable, it made the AI brilliant. As you play a game, the AI adjusts to your play style. If you stupidly try and rush the arena, the AI picks up on this and alters its defense to match. If you spread and try long passes across the ice, the AI will ground back in a zone and try to pick off those passes. The AI also will try and make sure you don’t just keep shooting from across the arena by barging towards you instead of waiting for you to politely come into the arena.

You will know when the AI starts making both offensive and defensive adjustments. The announcers cue you in regularly. It's done subtly, so that it won't break the flow of the game, but with a sharp ear, you can pick up hints. "The Sharks have been crashing the net all night and they are not doing so well," should tell you to stop rushing. All these subtle hints announce that the smart AI recognizes a pattern. At last, the announcers are real, not repetitive, and are useful.

Scoring is tougher this year, so EA has added a special feature to help gamers out on offense. The new create-a-play system lets you design dozens of plays for almost any situation on the ice. Let's say you want to create a few plays for a 4-man side split. There are seventeen different possible formations for a split. For each instance, you can create a play.
You record the movements of the puck carrier and then the movements of the man without the puck. You can even adjust timing, so if you want your fourth guy to fake the right change, you can do so.

There are still some issues with NHL 08. There are some clipping issues that make some impossible moves possible, the presentation isn’t perfect, and the AI seems to be able to come back in nearly every game. Another issue is the 30 frames per second in addition to these clipping issues on the PlayStation 3. The 360 version of this game runs at 60 frames per second, but luckily, this frame rate issue doesn’t affect the gameplay like it did in Madden. You can definitely expect the exact same game as on the 360, if not, with slightly better character models. Even if EA doesn't manage to fix all these issues before NHL 08 ships, it is looking to be a strong game that can teach many people things they hadn’t cared to find out in hockey. I loved it so much, that I actually started skating again to play on an actual arena.