I guess I should do my intro. I joined because there was an NHL94 tourney in Regina, and upon doing research on the top NHL94 players in the world, I found there were some from Sask, Canada, but none from my city!! So I sought to change that. I would have won the tournament if not for Halifax driving his and his buddy Matt's ass 2.5 hours to scoop the prize. Anyways... after that, I dragged my bro (seventieslord) and my cousin (boehm23) away from their other games of choice. Fun fact: Seventieslord writes for The Hockey news and is a badass hockey historian. The last NHL game we bought as kids was NHL 97. We saved up our own money to do it. Seventieslord was 16. I was 13. Boehmer was 6. He didn't come into the picture until much later lol.
Anyways, we had a good crew of NHL 97'ers. I do appreciate a few things from that game. fake shots were integral to getting around seventieslord's over aggressive manual goalie. he liked blocking shots, but I never utilized that much. Season mode was cool and so was Gilmour's "deke and deliver". Also being able to get up using spin-o-rama after being checked was nice. BUT, that all being said, I am getting used to 94 and can see why most consider it the best gameplay overall.
Over the past month, I've played about 400 exis over Retroarch and helped ten other new members get set up on static IP and fort forwarding. Once I did it while I was playing an exi and the guy was flabbergasted. Most games have been against Schmidt which was quite a rude awakening. I estimate I'm about 69-321-10 over those first 400 games. While he says my skill is improving, I feel much like a mouse caught by the tail by a cat, while the cat says I'm getting really good at struggling...
Either way, I thought I would quit after my local tourney, but I'll stick with it and probably attend any close in-person tourneys and try to improve my skill and ranking and be the first Regina player in the top 30 Sega rankings. Happy to be here. Cheers.