NHL 2K8’s Create-A-Team (CAT) mode has seen a significant upgrade this year. When you create your team, you can now create up to three jerseys. You could pick an overall color scheme and take a pretty standard route — say, a white home, a colored away, and a black alternate. Or you can go nuts and make all three jerseys completely unique — maybe a purple home, bright green and yellow away, and pink alternate. The amount of customization and how cool (or embarrassing) your created team looks is up to you.

As for colors, the sky is the limit this year. Whereas in the past you were limited to a handful of preset colors to choose from, now you have an entire color wheel to move around and create literally any custom color you’d like. These colors can be applied to everything — jerseys, stripes, name and number (plus outlines), helmets, equipment (down to the fingers and cuffs of your gloves), you name it. You can also customize every aspect of your goalie’s equipment, the location of the numbers on your sleeves, and more. And once you have your team set up, your created color scheme will even become the color scheme for the UI/menus.

But colors and equipment aren’t everything; what about the other options? There are about 120 logos, including all NHL team logos. Many are new, and none of them have names, so you aren’t stuck with the “Bulldozers” or other name determined BY print in the logo itself. There are also a few classic logos, such as the Winnipeg Jets and others.

Speaking of team names, you can make up any location and name you want. There are over 100 team names in the audio database, so if you happen to choose one of those the announcers will say it out loud. But along with the city name and 3-letter abbreviation, you can type everything out to be anything you’d like, and are not limited to preset lists or cities.

Once your team (or teams — you can create up to 5 per roster save file) is complete, you can use it in game. You can bring 5 created teams into a season or up to 4 into a franchise. Each team you bring in will replace a team of your choice, so you can set yourself up wherever you’d like in the league, or even create almost a whole division of created teams if you so choose.

People have been asking for a long time for a deeper, more customizable Create-A-Team mode, and this year 2K has delivered. The amount of options is staggering and should really allow people to create completely personalized teams. Thanks to 2K Sports for the information and the screenshots.

You’ve read a lot about NHL 2K8’s biggest new features… a rebuilt graphics engine, new ProStick™ control scheme, authentic new faceoff system, revamped franchise mode, online leagues, new goalies, shootouts and Superstar Moves. But there are a number of other changes and additions to NHL 2K8 that may not have made the front page but are noteworthy nonetheless. Some details, straight from 2K Sports:

• One-timers now have an Easy/Medium/Hard option. When you have the One-Timer Difficulty setting on Easy, it works like it has for the past few years. When it’s on Medium or Hard, the aiming becomes more difficult, and it’s a lot trickier to actually get your shot on net. They also did some work to make some of the unrealistic one-timers not happen, so if a player isn’t facing the right way or is in a poor position, often he will instead catch the puck and then shoot it so you don’t get an awkward looking shot.
• The CPU is definitely quite a bit less reliant on one-timers now, and the programmers spent a lot of time working on their offensive AI overall and how they attack. Also, many one-timers go wide, so it is no longer “the way to score” in the game. Whereas before it was likely to end a game with the CPU attempting 15-20 one-timers, they’re now averaging just 3 to 8 in a given game (tending to vary based on the team being played). In sheer numbers alone, the AI’s reliance on the one-timer has been cut about 50% to 80%… add in the medium/hard difficulty levels and the drop in accuracy, and it’s going to take a particularly good one-timer to score, rather than it being the norm.
• As for the defensive AI, it is definitely much better. They specifically worked on countering some of the up and down play, so hopefully when using the sim sliders people will be rewarded by setting up their offenses rather than always trying to rush up and down the ice and stickhandle their way to the net. That’s not to say that you can’t do some cool stuff with the ProStick, but I think we allow for a good balance when the game is played under the right settings. And with the addition of the directional pokes, the AI is better at standing you up at the blue line. It is more noticeable on slower, more realistic speeds, and will play smoother and tighter than last year.
• We now have the ability to share (and rate) Game Styles online. This means that now people no longer have to worry about copying everything over to the forums, and then back to their console. Now if someone creates a really good slider set, he can just upload them online and everyone else can download and use them instantly. And your own Game Styles are easily accessible online for custom matches and when creating leagues, so you don’t have to spend the time recreating every little setting.
• They spent a lot of time working on the fatigue levels, especially with the sprint feature, so there shouldn’t be any trouble figuring out who the tired players are.
• As far as the rivalries go, the gameplay sliders and settings are no longer affected. However, the crowd excitement and general atmosphere will still be more intense. Also, rivalry games still have more of an effect on team chemistry and fatigue than a regular game will. And they also factor in a bit to the new power rankings system they added.
• You can now cancel a pass. Just press B (circle on PS3) mid-pass, effectively adding a fake pass to your puck handling arsenal.
• When you do a fake shot, the player now performs a nice head-fake animation.
• When you poke from behind, you are now prone to slashing, hooking or tripping the player and getting a penalty.
• The diving pokecheck is now mapped to the Y button (triangle on PS3), which is also used for kneeling and sliding blocks. It is all contextual. This eliminates one of the cheesiest exploits on defense — diving all over the ice at will to block shots and passes — and forces players to rely on more realistic defensive tactics, only poke-diving when proper to do so.
• There is a very nice control scheme for people who like the old school controls, which also includes the ProStick™.
• You can swap face buttons and bumpers in the controller layouts of the new control schemes.
• You can edit and save any team’s strategies, and it will all be loaded in one file.
• You can use Superstar Moves for regular gameplay, turn them off entirely, or enable them for shootouts only.
• There is now an option to turn off CPU teammates automatically shooting in rebounds.
• There is now a Sim leaderboard for people playing in the Sim lobby.
• 2K Reelmaker is available on Xbox 360, allowing you to save replays into a highlight reel. This is a nice feature with all the new controls and ability to create some pretty cool highlights with the Pro Stick and Superstar Moves.
• In online leagues, exhibition games in your League Lobby are now played using your league’s sliders.

A special thanks to the guys at 2K Sports for the updates. More info and media to come!