Tim's missing a tooth and grinning like a madman. Find out why.

Man, I love hockey. Not just because I'm Canadian, mind you. It's just that hockey is the greatest sport on the face of the earth. Not for me your football, with the 5 seconds of mayhem combined with 30 second rest periods after each down. Not for me your soccer, with violent fans, nil-nil scores, and players who go down like they've been shot if someone even looks in their general direction. Not for me your baseball, with your 6 hour games, tobacco chewing and grown men thoughtfully scratching their nether regions in public. Not for me your synchronized swimming, with...never mind. No, none of those lesser sports for me. Give me a sport where men fly like the wind with razor sharp blades on their feet, wooden sticks in their hands, and darkness in their hearts. Where there are no out of bounds to save you from the 230-pound behemoths that desire nothing more from life than to keep hitting you, and hitting you, and hitting you. Where small discs of rubber are fired at 100 miles per hour...and madmen willingly throw themselves in front of these projectiles. Well folks, by including the various nuances that make hockey great, Electronic Arts' NHL 2002 looks to build on the success and accolades that last year's version earned during the PlayStation 2 launch.

After suffering through NHL 2002's completely underwhelming introduction video, you're treated to a nice clean front end. There are tons of options available - the usual suspects like exhibition, season, playoffs, and tournament are all present and accounted for, but NHL 2002 has some new twists this year. By taking a page from Madden's book and including NHL Cards for gamers to pursue, the coolness factor got turned up a couple of notches. Just like Madden's card program, NHL allows you to earn player cards for achieving milestones during gameplay, from scoring on the first shot of the game, to winning ten faceoffs in a period, to getting a hat-trick with two different players. Unlike Madden, however, NHL goes about this in a much more sensible and challenging way - once you achieve a milestone, you can't gain any additional card points for achieving it again, unless you do it on a different difficulty level. This prevents users from just repeating the easiest milestones over and over again to rack up the card points. Plus, the higher the difficulty level, the more points you gain for the same milestone. This is a much more intelligent way to separate the gaming wheat from the chaff - good job, EA. Besides player cards, there are also game cards to be earned. These include secrets like gameplay cheats, cool Easter eggs, extra celebrations that you can trigger using the controller after scoring a goal, new rinks...there are a lot of goodies to earn, and the NHL Card program is key to getting them all. Another cool new addition is the sweet new ability to run a franchise over 10 seasons, tracking stats for the players in the game and retired players as well. There is a draft available, and NHL Card bonuses directly tied into some of the long-term milestones, like scoring 500 goals over a career, for example.

I prepared to start a brand new season, but first, I wanted to create myself in the game. This is one aspect of NHL 2002 that is leaps and bounds over last year's version. In NHL 2002, you can select different eye colours, various eyebrow shapes, goatees and moustaches, varying skin shades, noses and lips...the create player mode is outstanding. It doesn't have NHL Hitz 20-02's ability to change body sizes to the same degree, but it was still possible to create a close likeness of my hot 'n sexy Billy Dee features. There are beginner and advanced skill settings for use with a created player, so if all you want to do is crank up the offensive slider, that will take care of all the offensive categories - alternatively, you can use the advanced skill settings and tweak every last offensive/defensive rating to your heart's content. Once I created myself, I dropped my avatar onto the Vancouver Canuck's roster and was good to go.

Gameplay is a real treat. The frame rate during gameplay is rock solid, something that wasn't always the case in NHL 2001. While the default settings aren't exactly realistic, EA has once again provided the much-lauded gameplay sliders to tweak the gameplay to your liking. Game speed, hitting, defensive/offensive coverage, puck friction - with a little time, you'll have settings to rival the real thing. Some new gameplay aspects this year - puck control. When you deliver a pass, whoever receives the pass doesn't necessarily get full possession immediately. The higher your control rating, the faster you'll be able to skate away, shoot or pass the puck. If you have a low control rating, an opponent can come by and strip you of the puck because it takes you longer to settle it down. I'll be honest, it takes some getting used to, but now I wouldn't have it any other way. A player like Jaromir Jagr or Markus Naslund should be able to receive a pass and immediately take off down the ice, whereas a Brent Sopel or Deron Quint should take longer to control the puck in real life. The over-the-top hits from last year have been removed - no more flipping ass over teakettle after being nailed. Correct physics come into play for hits now, and it is infinitely more satisfying. One-timers are much more difficult to score with on the higher difficulty levels - goaltenders read the play correctly, and more often than not get themselves in good positions to stop the puck. Again, the ratings make a difference as to whether a goal is scored or the opportunity is missed. Last year's problem with all shots from the blue line going in has been ganked in NHL 2002 - if you don't screen the goaltender with one of your forwards, that shot from the point has little to no chance of success. Exactly the way it should be. There are some problems when carrying the puck into the offensive zone with a defensive player - the forwards tend to go offside when in this situation way more than is acceptable. If the scenario involves lugging the puck in with a slower defenceman, I can understand why this occurs, but not when using a smooth-skating offensive defenceman like Sandis Ozolinsh. Deke moves are more advanced this year, with the ability to hold the triangle button down and steer the puck with the D-pad/analog pad.

This provides a greater degree of control for the player, and is effective but not so much that the game is unbalanced. The defensive AI is vicious, and once momentum swings one way or the other, you can expect that team to grab the game by the throat and really pour it on. There are a couple of new features in the replay and breakaway department - whenever there is a huge hit or save, you'll see a few replays immediately after the fact. It looks cool, but spoils the flow of gameplay. Luckily, you can turn the frequency down, or even off. The new Breakaway Cam involves the game switching to a letterbox mode on a breakaway, with no audio but the beating of the player's heart. This can also be turned off. Fighting is the usual throwaway nonsense that EA has provided in previous years, and this is very disappointing. When Sega's NHL 2K and Midway's NHL Hitz 20-02 (both developed by Black Box Games, interestingly enough) can come out of the gate and provide a fighting engine that makes sense, utilizes proper physics, gives weight to the punches, and generally FEELS like a true part of the game as opposed to an afterthought, there is absolutely no excuse why EA's game can't get it together after how many years. I suppose that everyone has to have an Achilles' heel, but the fighting portion of NHL 2002 smacks of laziness.

The graphics and sound in EA's NHL product has always been a hallmark of the series, and this year is no different. The player intro sequence has been revamped, with improved lighting and recreates the feel of a TV broadcast quite well. Sum 41, The Tea Party, and the Barenaked Ladies are just a few of the groups that have licensed music in NHL 2002, and it adds to the atmosphere. If you have DTS 5.1, NHL 2002 will take advantage of that to really bring the sounds of the rink into your living room. Jim Hughson is a rock on play-by-play as usual, while Don Taylor has taken over the colour commentary job this year. Don's work is a mixed bag. He's always been quite funny, and does the same here, but it's too much. When everything he says has to be amusing, it gets repetitious and unfortunately, tiresome. Serious commentary combined with some cute comments here and there is far more effective than bashing the user over the head repeatedly with the ha-ha stick. Hopefully EA will remember this next year, and mix it up a bit. While I'm on the subject, what on earth happened to the PA announcer this year?

Listen, the whole "Look out world, here comes the laughter bus" routine wears thin quickly - this isn't "Showtime at the Apollo", it's a hockey game, so treat it with some respect and can the so-called comedy routines. Somehow, I have this nagging suspicion that nobody would have the gall to try this with the Madden series, so why try it with NHL? Make it a bonus feature, where you can earn the comedic commentary as an NHL Card. In-game sounds are a mixed bag, with great samples for skating, hits, and pucks hitting the boards, and dumb ones (rocket wooshing? come on) for slapshots. The crowd sounds are pretty good, with specific chants for each teams to encourage the troops. During cut-scenes, 3-D polygonal crowds jump around and dance, show off pucks that they've collected, jeer the team, and generally are quite cool. Unfortunately, the 3-D crowd only shows up during cut-scenes, all other times it's the same flat polygons. During gameplay, though, it doesn't really matter much - if you're spending time looking at the crowd instead of what is on the ice, your team will get run. Hard.

NHL 2002 is a huge improvement on a fun, but flawed 2001 product. Many of the irritants from last year's version have been toned down or eliminated entirely, and this is one game that truly deserves the praise that it will receive. NHL 2002 is the high watermark for hockey games on next-generation platforms, and has set a standard that will be hard for competing products to match. Thanks to the flawed PA/colour commentary choices and weak-sauce fighting, it isn't perfect by any means, but for anyone who loves hockey, it's damn close to NHL '94 for addictiveness. If you have any interest in sports games at all, you owe it to yourself to check out NHL 2002.