NHL 2004

I've been waiting for NHL 2004 to come out for months now. The reviews have been great. Everything looks fantastic. It's supposes to be the best hockey sim ever. And I've been going to the homepage at EA Sports for a while now, patiently watching the countdown timer tick off the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the shipping date. Today was the long-awaited day. Zero hour.

So I called up Compucentre today to confirm that it had arrived. "Oh yeah," they said. "We've had it since Friday." What the hell? How did they have it before the shipping date? I could have been playing it all weekend? I could have been taking out my pent-up aggressions of an entire work week using Tie Domi as my violence-dispensing avatar?

No matter. I played Vice City all weekend, so plenty of violence was mine for the spreading around. And I now hold NHL 2004 in my hot little hand as I clear out the hard drive space necessary to install it. (Goodbye, Microsoft Word! Goodbye, Norton Antivirus!) I'm going to have such a rock'em, sock'em good time that I may have to call in sick tomorrow.