We'll get the bad news out of the way first. There's a good chance there won't be an NHL season this year. The good news? For 20 bucks you can have a kick-ass game to simulate the "season that never was." Want better news? You won't even have to wait until the cooler fall weather to hit the virtual ice. Thanks to Sega's ESPN NHL 2K5, you can experience this year's iffy NHL season while the boys of summer are still worried about pennant races and the guys on the gridiron have yet to play an official down.

This year, there are only two ways for Xboxers to get their skate on. With Microsoft sitting out the season and not releasing its Rivals title, it's a head-to-head showdown between heavyweights Sega and EA Sports. And, while the competition should be tough between these two major players -- thanks to EA Sports' NHL 2005's first-ever Xbox Live support -- Sega's ESPN-branded title hits the shelves three weeks before the EA game. And it hits the shelves so strongly -- and at a very sweet $19.95 price -- that there may not be too many hockey fans left with unblistered thumbs by the time NHL 2005 drops.

Yes, it's cool to beat the competition to the market, but anytime a hockey game shows up in, well, the summertime, you have to wonder if the thing may have been rushed out the door. Thankfully, while there's a slight letdown in the overall presentation of the game, there wasn't much wrong with last year's model that would have required a major overhaul. As a result, what you get here is a fine-tuned version of 2K4 with a couple of new control options, a new -- and still clunky -- fighting system, and a mess of fun-as-hell party games.

Hey, look what I found!

On the ice, you'll now be able to lay your opponents out cold thanks to the use of right-stick directional hitting, which developer Kush Games seems to have borrowed from EA. Instead of just turning the game into a NHL Hitz-like sucker-punch fest, though, it adds an element of strategy, sometimes bordering on luck. Hit someone too hard and you're headed to the penalty box. The hard hits are more effective than your standard check, but you take a risk whenever you dig deep and let someone have it.

Of course, the more physical things get, the closer the guys get to dropping the gloves. An on-screen "tension meter" lets you see how close a team is to its boiling point. Once the meter is maxed out, someone is about to get their sweater pulled over their head. It's a fun concept, but I was more impressed by a similar system in last year's NHL Rivals. There, every skater had his own fuse that you could watch burn individually. It just seemed a little more true-to-life.

Once the gloves do come off, you'll be able to whack away in the game's new fighting mode. Theoretically, it should have been a lot cooler given the ability to grab the other guy with either hand and throw regular punches or uppercuts. But once you square off against someone, you'll realize just how lame the thing turned out. The grabbing doesn't seem to be of any real help, and when you do land a solid punch, your foe swoons back into this really strange position -- like a junior high school girl that just got kissed on the cheek by Justin Timberlake. Eventually, someone goes down and the other guy pounces on him for some cutscene ground-and-pound, however.