1. Unequip whatever booster you may have
2. Edit your pro and go to his equipment
3. Apply the Anniversary stick, gloves and skates
4. Edit your pro and make him a defensive d-man
5. Edit your pro’s attributes, you should see 86 with pack applied
6. Bob’s your uncle

Check out their site at http://www.ragtaghockey.org. Tons of work goes into their site, keeping track of every game statistic and ever recoding some of the match-ups. Each player ever has their own stat page, check mine out. 3 Loses, booo… Note I was blasted at 2 of those loses on a Saturday night at like 2am after a bar hop. Never a good idea. Sorry guys!

Here’s hopin to have finally found my online hockey home! NHL11, bring it!

The core design flaw are the thumbsticks non adhesive texture and convex shape creates a slippery surface making your thumbs slip off in high action moments. For sports games such as NHL10 and Shooters this means the difference between deking out your opponent or getting shot in the face because your thumb slipped off the stick and hit the start button. Fail.

While there are other flaws such as the glistening plastic used for the casing, the awkward ergonomic placement of R1/L1 and odd range of motion with the triggers making it difficult to pull off holding R1 and R2 simultaneously, I will concentrate on the thumbsticks.

There’s a company called http://www.geltabz.com/ who apparently had the same gripes as I and came up with a rather decent solution for this.

Cost with Shipping to Canada

Total: $21.88

A little on the expensive side for two little pieces of rubber but that’s mostly the shipping cost. If you’re in the states you can find them at gamestop. Otherwise, gather some buddies and order in bulk.

GelTabz in package

Instructions (simple):

Concave vs Convex

You must first remove the existing caps on the PS3 thumb sticks.

I used a small pain of needle nose pliers.

Slide the GelTabz on and boom, concave sticky goodness.

So far so good, I love these. There is absolutely no slippage and thinking I should have purchased more for all my ps3 and xbox joysticks.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The removal of the following bugs that have been in the game since NHL08 or are new to NHL10.

Invisibility
Where stuff goes through stuff. The lack of collision detection in this game is brutal.

Magic Brakes
Your player stops for no reason or starts to skate 0.5 miles an hour

Floppy Jalopies
Your pass goes 0.5 miles an hour towards any direction but the one you were pointing at

Ballerina Goalie
Goalie goes into spinerama animation way to often

CPU Cyborg Masterminds
Sometimes the CPU players becomes incredibly invincible

CPU Tardation
Sometimes the CPU players will do things that blow your mind, like skate away from a loose puck on a 1 on 1

Penalty shot breakaway bonanza
Way too many tripping calls on breakaways

Wrap crap
Wrap around goals glitch… lame

Zig Zag Power Wrister ( not to be confused with go go power rangers )
The new curve shot

Poke choke
Poke checking is useless so people use LB. A complete overdose of people getting down on their knees, this ain’t no brothel.
LB is useless so people use RB. A complete overdose of people doing magical puck swepes. Actually this is ok, but LB is now useless, find the medium.

Clusterfuck #1. Purchasable Booster Packs, Equipment and Booster Slots

Why is this a clusterfuck? First off, it’s absurd to create the most realistic hockey simulation, then sprinkle it with toques, graphiti pads, cammo helmets or plain and simple Golden equipment… I mean what the fuck kind of contradiction is that? Here’s what takes the cake, you buy this shit to increase your player’s skills, with A FUCKIN CREDIT CARD. Can you sense the happy in my all caps? Kudos to the management team over at EA because this is a genius cash cow, but what a fuckin disasterpeice.

Clusterfuck #2. Configuring Purchasable Booster Packs, Equipment and Booster Slots

Ok, so with the combination of Helmet,Skates,Stick and Gloves you have 4 rows of slots, each row contains 3 columns of slots. Let’s do some math.

5+ is $2.25

3+ is $1.67

1+ is $1.12

Helmet ( with 3 boost slots ) $2.25

Skates ( with 3 boost slots ) $2.25

Stick ( with 3 boost slots ) $2.25

Gloves ( with 3 boost slots ) $2.25

Worst case scenario, upgrading your dude full pin is
———————————

Equipment: $2.25 x 4 = $9

Slots: 4 Columns x 3 row of 5+ @ $2.25 = $45
———————————

GRAND TOTAL = Suck my dick dollars. I mean $54

You’re reading this right, $54 dollars for virtually, fuck all. That takes balls. If you have a wife or girlfriend, I strongly suggest you don’t tell her you purchased this shit because she’ll probably stop fucking you. I’m lucky though, my wife is incredibly awesome.

Clusterfuck #4. The locking up of your unlocked purchased goodies

Oh wait there’s more. Once you purchase all your shiny gear. There’s a possibility of them not working. Here I was skating around with my fire skates and douche bag toque and my 95 slap shot power when all of a sudden I wanted to make changes to some of my attributes, everything I purchased became locked again. Couldn’t use anything I purchased.

Emailed EA, they offered suggestions, nothing helped so they told me to call sony. Did that, ya right, this is the bowels of suicidal tech support. Called EA, they escalated to tier 3 support. No response from them so had to take matter in to my own hands with some good old trouble shoot’n. I eventually solved my own problem by having to delete my entire account on ps3 loosing a bunch of shit, mostly time and sanity. Fix is here if you need it btw…

Clusterfuck #4. Disconnection Problems

There’s a slew of people having disconnection issues. Luckily I’m not one of them, but people on my club are having this problem. They claim not having it when they create a new PSNID, but my theory is the same that fixed my lock problem. Delete your account and re-create it.

Clusterfuck #5. Collision Issues.

Not really a clusterfuck but has been my main gripe with NHL series since 08. When I block the fuckin puck, that puck better not go directly through my body. Sticks, pucks, bodies going directly through sticks, pucks bodies just ruins the game. If I put a stick through your head, you’re probably not going to get up and there’s going to be a fuckin mess on the ice.

Conclusion

While this whole rant was incredibly negative, don’t get me wrong, best fuckin game ever and I know the crew over at EA worked like crazed monkeys to get this game out. This booster pack shit probably created lots of tension in team meetings and you can’t fix everything with deadlines I know so don’t take this to heart. I appreciate the hard work and magnificent game, minus these quirks.

Rock on.

1. Yie Ar Kung Fu ( Fuck I loved this game )
2. Track & Field
3. Bubble Bobble
4. Wonderboy (Unfortunately I can only find the shitty C64 Version)
5. 1941 – Counter Attack
6. Arkanoid
7. Black Tiger
8. Dragon’s Lair
9. Gauntlet
10. Kung Fu
11. Pac Land
12. Spy Hunter
13. Tapper

I have PS3 Sean White and XBOX360 only Stoked and am incredibly disappointed in both. I’m a big snowboarding game fan and was expecting so much more then these 2 games.  Perhaps my expectations were heightened because of the polish on games like Skate where intuitive controls and realistic environments and physics are key. Guess it doesn’t help that these two titles aren’t from the EA monopoly where budget is king.

Even then, these games both seemed rushed, incomplete, drowning in bugs, poor performance, graphical and collision glitches. It kind of feels like your playing a PS1 game on a PS3 console. It feels dated, cheap and just not fun.

Amped was fun, I finished all the challenges twice and played countless hours of it, I also recall ESPN Snowboarding for the PS2 was quite awesome as well.  Both these games were played for an average of 30 minutes and will now sit on the shelf collecting dust or get traded for 4$ at EBgames.  Damn, I ‘ve got to really remind myself to rent games before I buy them…

I was actually going to do a comparison but there’s no point and I’m just too upset that I wasted $140 on two incredibly dull titles.

FUCKIN GARBAGE | DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY | RENT BEFORE YOU BUY

It’s been in my living room untouched for approximately 1.5 years.

Nintendo, the once magnificent leader of games has become nothing but a gimicky marketing focused consumer rip off. The whole thing reeks of cheese and is currently the most dissapointing gaming experience next to the sony PSP.

Do not promote shit people, spend your money on good, not bad.

I feel compelled to give an honest review here because I’m quite disappointed with the game. I’ve always been a huge fan of Skating games, played and owned them all. Skate 1, best skateboarding game by far. Skate 2, while having much potential, not so much.

Keep in mind that I am playing the PS3 version, so things may be different in the 360 world, which I haven’t tried yet but just may to see if it’s the same mess.

GRAPHICS AND PERFORMANCE

One big downfall is the graphics and performance of this game. I’ve tried setting the game to 720 and 1080 and both resolutions are equally shit. It actually feels like the graphics are from a first gen PS1 console… They’re that bad, pixelated, blurry and drab. The game often stutters and has problems when you start skating fast, or bail. It’s like the PS3 just can’t handle it, which is confusing because the resolution seems so reduced.

ONLINE

Things don’t get better here, if the game can’t perform well offline, add network latency to the mix and you have yourself a powerpoint slideshow. You can barely get a grind off because the game stutters so much, it’s quite sad actually. Especially when you try to do any kind of challenge as a group, you simply can’t because everyone is lagging.

SOUND

The only real positive I found in the game was the music. I loved the tunes but unfortunately you have that stupid douche bag following you around again. This guy says the stupidest fuckin shit you’ll ever hear and if I had a friend who spoke as often and inanely retarded as this guy, he would get many punches to the face. Unfortunately you can’t mute him because he’s a core part of the game. Big downfall.

FUN

I loved skate1 and was hoping for the same fun with this considering it’s cool new features like, moving crap around and getting off your board. Unfortunately because the game “chugs” so much, it’s hard to enjoy, the fact the textures look like shit doesn’t help either. I’m a sucker for games with good graphics. When you get off your skate board, it more frustrating because you feel like a gimp fucktard and the camera angle gets all clunky and trying to turn or look around is less then ideal. The whole point is to reach new places but you can’t even climb anything. Again, quite sad and disappointing.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Do I recommend this? Probably not as of today, unless a patch comes out to fix this shit, I see it sitting on my shelf along side Sean White snowboarding which was equally crappy. With EA laying off the black box team who created the game, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I had my hopes up because of the videos, reviews and screenshots from other sites looked quite promising but this is ultimately a let down and misleading cause it’s not the same game I played.

When I look at other screenshots, it’s as though they were provided by EA, hence the EA logo and have some fish eye, photoshop retouched goodness applied to them.

SCREENCAPS

http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/sports/skate2workingtitle/review.html?tag=topslot;title;2

http://www.gamershell.com/ps3/skate_2/screenshots.html?id=372404

Checkout a shot taken from my screen, quite a difference… Even the game text is blurry. Notice the poor texture on the garbage bin especially the phone booth,  and the pixelation on my character… Sad.

UPDATE! – Just tried the XBOX360 VERSION and it is much smoother, but again equally dull textures.

UPDATE! – A patch was recently released, easing up on the framerate drag making the game enjoyable but the game is still underperforming in half pipes and pools. When you open the menu, it’s almost like the game secretly tricks your TV to think you’re looking at 1080, but when you open the PS menu, you can see the fonts are all jagged like the PS is actually in 720 or lower.