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Mentor me, HABS! We can play every Wednesday at 8pm or something? I am struggling, but yes, I always get my games in. Throw me a bone!!!

This is a good topic and one I have a special interest in, being in danger of being a career B level player. Out of the gate I was quite poor, then a couple months in got to middling B level. That is where I am now. I remember King Raph of all people took time to help me along, even pausing during our exis to point out what I did wrong. It did help, but I just feel it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. If any A guys want to mentor me, I am certainly open to it! There was awhile when I played more than anyone possibly, though nowadays I go long stretches without playing. Would love it if someone saw a huge hole in my game and said "Your problem is manual goalie. Work on that and you will be 50% better."

If anyone has any tips on my play, or would like to mentor me I'd love that!

Plabax is a minor he cant go there. Think of the children you monsters

This has been discussed a few times before, and part of the reason I'm SLOWLY crafting together a strategy guide (www.nhl94strategy.com). I think each person has something different to work on to reach an "A" level, and I'm always happy to give feedback. I think we all benefit from better competition. Brutus got the basics right...manual goalie control is usually the first area. It doesn't have to be elite, but you have to be decent to play against top players. I think it's not only dekeing, but "finishing" overall. When a top guy gets an opportunity to score, be it on a breakaway, open one-timer (see: quick timers) deke, etc, they capitalize more often than not. Play against the computer and you should be having 15-0 games regularly. Vision, anticipation, positioning, adaptation, control, are just some things I can discuss with each person on how to elevate the rest of their game...offensively/defensively. And there are different styles, of course! Plabax and myself, for example, play differently (particularly on defense), but we each have success. One tip -- when the puck goes behind your opponents goalie, ONLY go in if you think you have a legitimate shot at obtaining the puck (most likely not). It drives me nuts when people fly in with all their forwards (sometimes d-men!) and smash around behind the net. It's a surefire way to get all of your players out of position.

As a general rule, the biggest ANY B level player can make is in 2 areas. #1 Goalie. The manual goalie on most B players is well below any standard required to compete, especially in the crunch, where manual is the most valuable. Once you are good enough to keep the game close, you need to be able to win it. And the A players no how to keep PRESSING, and you have to be able to make the stops. #2 DEKE. Watch TK's deke video and practice vs Eddy & Roy on 1-0 or 5v5 also. You need to be able to score on them at a high rate. OTHERWISE, when you play an elite player, he WILL figure out you can't score at a high percentage against auto goalie, and you are giving him an extra second or two in control of a defender instead of having to switch to goalie. DURING THIS TIME, you often will get checked and lose the puck without getting a shot off! You MUST force the other coach to use his manual often, and THEN, the cat/mouse game of deke/one timer/ pass, manual goalie, leave it on auto can begin and you can start to get into their heads as much as they are in your's.

Another thought, PLAYING A+ guys makes you see your flaws, but SOMETIMES, it can have you making the wrong corrections, leaving you treading water and in the same place overall as a player. So, I mentioned I was not shooting enough for a while. What happened was whenever I would "BLOW" a goal, I'd be all tilt, and give up a goal the other way, almost instantly. So, I started to get too conservative on offense. When I played B players, my defense would remain tight, and I"d win low scoring games. But, when I played A+ players who would figure out, HEY, he's not putting enough pressure on me, I can go crazy on the attack without giving up goals, then it would go down hill for me. Basically, as I tried to adjust on the fly to cover up holes in my game the A+ players were exposing, I was creating more weaknesses. Figuring out that I have to apply pressure on the A+ guy same as he does me, and rely on my manual goalie to bail me out forces you to play on a higher level. Do I get just KILLED still some games?? Yes. But, the victories are much more earned for the A+ guy than before. They need to get those extra few B shots, extra one timer pass off, or some great manual save last second on a sure goal to preserve their win.

I think mentoring with a string of exi's for several weeks is a great way to upgrade the level of a player. As a player that has upgraded over the past year, I can only attest to what made me better: Take the WORST goalie you can as OFTEN as you can. Change your offense at least two or three times. In GENERAL, if you are a B player, your "old habits" are the wrong ones && your goalie play is not high enough. Using bad goalies forces you to use manual more often and forces you to adjust when & how you do that. Having played some 2v2 back when it was played (not heavily, but enough), I recognize when I play Habs where I see a manual save I feel he learned in 2v2. It's weird, you can almost sense that was a crazy move he learned doing on 2v2. SO, more experience can lead to higher level of play, but it also takes time to absorb what you have learned. FOR ME, the biggest jump came when I gave up on "old me" being good enough. So, I don't play drunk! In addition, I was playing good for about a month, and came across AJ. He just beat the shite out of me, like 8-1. After a few beat downs, he told me I was trying TOO hard to get perfect shots and not getting enough SHOTS up. That's when I realized I needed to tweak how I play more than a little on offense. My defense was always decent. I upgraded my goalie play, and changed my offense and it's shown over the past 2-3 months. So, playing vs A+ guys willing to give criticism and being will to ask HELPS. Being willing to adjust your game is a must if you plan on going from B to A.

It seems as if AJ is refusing to play me this season. That is cool. BUT, I want to say something. If we do meet up in the playoffs (round 3), I'm not going to waste my time playing this guy's game and let him do whatever he wants. I'm not going to tolerate any buffoonery. I'm not tolerating any garbage such as stupid play times because of "having no connection and time", and I'm not going to deal with his antics IN-GAME such as putting on +3 smoothing and refusing to take it off or scoring on lag spikes. There should be a hard deadline of 5-7 days. If we fail to reach the deadline primarily to AJ's stupid scheduling/antics, it's going to be a forfeit for AJ. If it's on me, I will take the forfeit. If the series DOES get a "deadline extension" because of the "oh, I don't want to have a forfeit late in the playoffs with top players", I'm not going to play. If it results in my disqualification then so be it. There is no point in wasting the league's time over a grown man who has no "time" or internet in 2016. If it comes to that point, think of it as the first step in the NHL '94 community of not tolerating the bullshit of guys who don't want to free up some time in their life to play a video game.

We made a simple tool for tracking series. It is currently only for NHL94 ROM, and 7 game series. ("We" is Atomic and myself, though Atomic has done the Lion's share for sure. Chaos sent us the gamesave parser to start things off, too.) See: http://nhl94rocks.com This is Alpha, so there will be issues. Atomic and I made it to track our own games, and then thought, hey, let's open it up to the community. If you have questions about it, ask them here.

Added the ability to filter by forwards, defense, goalies: http://nhl94rocks.com/comparePlayer.php?goalies=true&s=Team&sOrder=DESC

kgman robbed once again! congrats angrygay !

Just made a few updates to the Series Stats page. Corrected the Total per series Penalty Minutes Added Series Shots on Goal total Added OT Identifier to each game Winner Now bolded for each game Changed Pearate back to PeeRat as per smozoma

I don't think I've utilized this thread yet, and i'm relatively new so here we go. Everyone I go by the handle Trojan, and I run retro video game tournaments and LAN parties out of Green Bay WI. I recently started the WI Chapter of King of 94, coincidentally hosting a tournament this coming Saturday. I am eager to try out the online league scene once i figure out why my diagonals don't pick up on my controllers. So far the community has been amazing overall. I originally cut my teeth on the PC DOS version, aka NHL Hockey, and discovered the magic of the Genesis version later. I hope to meet many of you at our annual tournaments as our humble events grow in popularity.

No, this is not what I'm talking about, maybe you've forgotten the game where I especially approached you about the sluggishness you had, because it was so visible even to the opponent. This would be controversial to my home records in classic as well where you can't check the true values since they are masked (and remember my teams have had advantage 2 at home, it should affect the awarenesses at least as well), but this one game I was talking about was in gdl exi I think.

Hey GusIslander, welcome to the community. No shortage of people you can find to play here online any given night. If you're Gens, feel free to hit me up on my AIM located in my sig. See you out there!

No love for Kevin Stevens The most unappreciated player in the game.

Fine by me. I'll be in the garage. Let me know when you're all ready.

any body have this one, i'm looking for the one with the iowa stars and such