After booting up the game, you’re presented with a much darker front end than last year’s version. Too dark, if you ask me – the light blue of Hitz 20-02 presented a more light-hearted approach than this year’s version. The announcer no longer yells the players’ names as you select them – where is the love, guys? Regardless, there are the usual suspects on the options list and some new additions as well. Exhibition and Tournament make an appearance, but now Midway has added a Franchise and Season Mode into the mix.

Season Mode is just like the more established sims on the market. Pick a team, set your difficulty and number of games, decide on a fantasy draft and go to town. The Franchise Mode allows you to create a team from the ground up – choose a nickname, team logo, hotspot for shots, even separate defensive and offensive schemes. Create your players on an individual basis, then take the team and travel around the world map, taking on all comers and earning experience by completing certain tasks during the games. These range from winning a certain number of faceoffs to completing a certain number of passes and/or hits. There is a very irritating bug in the Franchise Mode, though. You cannot back out of the Create Team screen – you either have to continue through through Create Team and Create Player in order to get back to the main screen, or reset your PS2 altogether. It smacks of shoddy design, and it’s surprising that neither the Black Box/Midway development team fixed this or Sony America’s submissions approval team caught this.

Gameplay in NHL Hitz 20-02 was fast, furious and unforgiving, and 20-03 continues this tradition in fine fashion. Goaltenders are slightly more difficult in the default difficulty settings, which is a nice change. A more radical departure in Midway’s “adrenaline-style” formula takes place in the “on-fire” option. Instead of automatically setting your player on fire after scoring 3 one-timers as in last year’s game, in Hitz 20-03, one-timers, hits and shots all contribute to filling two special meters at the top of the screen. When the first meter is filled, you can trigger the “on-fire” option for your player, and when both are filled, the entire team can be electrified. This puts control into the user’s hands and a welcome gameplay design change. The fighting engine is the same as last year, with one marked difference. Both combatants are penalized for fighting and removed from the ice, leaving the teams short a man. This allows for even more open ice with 2-on-2 play. Penalty situations also include being sent to the sin bin for nailing goalies – you can run opposing forwards and defenders with impunity, but hit the masked man and you’ll leave your team shorthanded. Thankfully, all of these penalties can be turned off in the options menu.

Animation is similar to Hitz 20-02, with a few new additions. Player dive to poke-check the puck when they’re beat, drop to block shots and passes, and generally look a little smoother than last year’s version. There is a strange anomaly with one-timer animations – the puck actually travels to the player’s skate first, then after a slight delay it hits the stick and the follow-through is triggered. Minor, really, and only noticeable during the goal replay, but it’s still there. A very nice touch that Midway has added is that scoring hat-tricks for the home team actually results in hats being thrown on the ice. which is quite cool to see.

The real bonus addition in NHL Hitz 20-03 is the new set of mini-games. There are 6 to choose from, 5 of which serve to teach different aspects of the game, from hitting to passing to shot selection and everything in between. I’m torn as to which is my personal favourite – King of the Rink, in which you knock people around for points – or Own the Ice, where puck possession and the ability to control the ice is paramount. A great feature in single-player, and incredible fun with 2 or more friends playing. The Scotty Bowman Hockey School feature is somewhat disappointing, though. The former Detroit coaching legend provides voice-over tutorials for passing, blocking shots, wristers, hitting – all the skills needed to win in the game. I was hoping for more along the lines of video instruction, especially with the wonders of DVD storage. Still, it’s a nice little addition, but not enough on its own to warrant purchase.

Midway has thoughtfully included international rinks in NHL Hitz 20-03…but there aren’t any differences in actual rink size, unlike the real rinks. The size is the same as the others, they’ve just slapped a flag texture on the ice and that’s it. And what on earth is the deal with the weather option indoors? The graphics on Xbox are much sharper than the PS2 version, and the slowdown problems have been completely fixed as well. This has an excellent effect on gameplay, and makes the overall proceedings that much smoother than Sony's game. Audio is fine, music is your typical garage rock, but thankfully the Xbox allows you to use your custom soundtrack from the HD in the game, just like last year's. The gameplay SFX are the same as Hitz 20-02, and there’s a new colour commentator to go with the play-by play. As it stands, however, the samples used for colour commentary aren’t fun or interesting, and don’t add anything to the proceedings. On occasion it is flat out wrong. When Todd Bertuzzi beats the snot out of Chris Pronger, the colour guy shouldn’t call the win a triumph of the mismatch. Midway would have been better served to imitate the hilarious colour commentary from MLB Slugfest, or just not bother at all.

The secret rinks, teams and player models from last year are all available from the get-go in this year’s version. This doesn’t mean that there are no secrets to earn, just new ones. There are also 3 movies included, a making of NHL Hitz, a Midway promo and a Chris Pronger promo video as well. Someone forgot to sync up the audio with the video on the Hitz and Pronger videos before burning the final shipping version, however. Watching Pronger look like he’s in a poorly-dubbed Godzilla flick is the height of unintentional hilarity.

NHL Hitz 20-03 is a very fun game, and the Xbox version is the best one of all. Unlike last year’s version, which was fully dedicated to being smash-mouth hockey fun, the tone in Hitz 20-03 is a little more serious, but the smooth framerate and fun gameplay recall the fun times involved in NHL 94 on the Sega Genesis. If that sounds like heresy, deal with it - the game is that much fun, especially in multiplayer contests. Midway should be pleased at what they've been able to accomplish, and the shortcomings in the PS2 version have been ironed out on the Xbox, leaving hockey gamers everywhere with the best arcade style hockey game to date. Kudos to Black Box and Midway for the ultimate multiplayer hockey scorefest out there.