With all these changes and additions and tweaks to the gameplay, some might be wondering if the core game still feels as solid and realistic as it has in past years. The answer is absolutely yes. The pacing still feels completely perfect, moving fast at all the right times and generally feeling like a real game of hockey with lots of back-and-forth action. Realistic numbers of shots, goals, points, and practically every stat you can think of are typically on the postgame boards. The game still doesn't do a particularly good job of getting all your lines involved automatically, but tweaking the setting to manual line changes is all you need to do to correct this. As mentioned before, all the new rule changes are in effect in 2K6. We couldn't find anything missing from the list that's posted on NHL's Web site, so it looks like everything's up to speed. We can't say exactly whether or not the new rules really change the way the game plays--if anything, it seems pretty much the same to us. All told, though, 2K has delivered another extremely realistic and exciting game of hockey on the gameplay front. Though some of the changes might rub some people the wrong way, the overall flow of the game is as fantastic as it's ever been, and the AI can really be some of the most challenging out there when you up the difficulty.

Controlling the goalie = Not Fun.

For 2K6, the developers have put together yet another incredibly deep roster of modes that is an absolute steal for the budget price of this package. The franchise mode by itself would be worth such a price. All the great features from last year, like international rookie scouting, contract negotiations, and staff communication are joined by a new practice mode and team chemistry. Practice mode lets you set up individual practices for your players, put together group scrimmages for the purposes of upping chemistry, and create individual skill drills for bonus stat upgrades. Practicing ties into the new fatigue system. Players, like in real life, will now become fatigued if they're overworked, so you'll need to strike a careful balance between how hard you practice them and how much game time they'll see during a week.

As for the chemistry system, it's not unlike the system that was introduced in EA's NHL 2005 last year. Players are broken up into four categories: scoring, skating, hard-nosed, and utility. Like the EA system, putting too many players of the same type together just doesn't work. Generally, it's good to have a single skater, a single scorer, and either a utility or hard-nosed player to complement them on a line. Having a line with good chemistry nets stat boosts for those players, and bad chemistry has a converse effect. The system is great, save for one annoying hitch: Sometimes chemistry on a line simply won't work for reasons that just aren't obvious. Part of it may have to do with the game's happiness measurement, which actually tracks how pleased a player is with his overall role on the team--sort of a morale tracker, of sorts. And sometimes players' happiness will just take big dips, even if they're getting significant play time. There's no communication with players via the e-mail system, so it's impossible to see what, if anything, is causing this dip. Fortunately, it's rare that such morale drops actually result in serious problems, but there are times when you may have to trade away a high-ranked player just because you can't make him happy.

For what it's worth, this year's franchise mode progresses like a real hockey season, more so than it ever has before. Trades are frequently offered, especially toward the trade deadline, and pretty much every offer makes sense on some level. For example, you won't see the CPU try to trade you Rick Nash for Alexander Suglabov, or vice versa. Free-agent bidding works similarly well, and although there's no definitive salary cap, each team has a hard budget that it can't go over, which is just about as good as a signified cap. Over time, rookies develop, older players retire, and things go on pretty much as they ought to. Some of the glitches that screwed up the experience last year have been definitively fixed here, too. The playoffs' injury bug that prevented players with minor injuries from returning during the playoffs is apparently no more (as we had several injuries over a few playoff series, and all returned). The CPU now actually knows how to auto-fill a line when an injury occurs (making it so you don't have to constantly jump out of a schedule simulation and reformat your lines yourself), and 2K has added in an interest meter for contract signings, which gives you an idea of how interested a free agent is in the money you're offering. These are all good fixes.

Chemistry is undeniably important when setting lines.

With that said, we still noticed a few glitches here and there in the franchise mode. For one, during a couple of different seasons, the standings would just stop registering overtime losses and shoot-out losses. As much as we'd like to believe that the NHL's want of higher scoring was purely the reasoning for this, it looks more like a stat-tracking glitch that just happens at random. Another issue comes from games played during franchise. Every once in a while, weird graphical glitches rear their ugly heads, like an entire game against Vancouver where goalie Dan Cloutier never had a helmet on. We weren't ever able to reproduce any single issue more than once, but generally speaking, it seems like franchise games are a little more prone to glitches than other modes.

Outside of franchise, all the modes that made their respective debuts last year are back once again. Party mode works fundamentally the same, but with some variations. There are 18 minigames in total, several more than in last year's game. All the games that were so much fun previously are just as fun here, but some of them just feel wildly overreaching. It's one thing to have a game where four players compete for one puck and try to score as many goals as they can into a net that has a blocker that goes up and down. It's quite another to have to do the same thing with a bunch of obstacles on the course, and periodically have to scramble to a musical chairs-like target in order to not have your point total drop. Frantic action is certainly what you would want in games like these, but in some cases, it feels like 2K just had to stretch these existing concepts too far to come up with something new. But hey, at least all the old games are still a blast.