The folks up at EA Canada are nearing their goal as NHL 09 skates towards its September release. They are undoubtedly working very hard since they have a hard act to follow considering how well NHL 08 was received by most gamers. Also, with such high expectations, it's no surprise that the OS community has tons of questions when it comes to NHL 09. Due to this fact, we here at Operation Sports felt it was important to get the NHL developers to answer some questions from the Operation Sports community. So every Friday, until NHL 09 releases, OS will be running five-question-Q&A sessions with NHL 09 developers. This is the fourth Q&A session we have had thus far. Enjoy!

Lubey: For the EASHL, if you have six people from your team online, but none are goalies, can one of them play goalie and still have reasonable ratings?

Andy Agostini: All EA Sports Hockey League players will be able to play goalie and they will all start out with a basic template for being a goalie based on what goalie type they chose. As the user earns hockey cards online they will receive attribute points both as a player and a goalie. Now as we have found out playing games here at our studio. Anybody can play goalie but not everybody is great at it. So everybody will be able to play goalie and have reasonable ratings it’s the skill in which that player plays goalie that will affect things for his team.

RealmK: On the topic of penalties, will interference be called more appropriately this year? One of my major gripes with 08 is a lot of times when you'd send a pass into the neutral zone the AI would hip check the player who was about to receive the puck while the puck was still 20 feet away, which is blatant interference.

AA: There is much less neutral zone interference by the CPU this year as they are more focused on playing proper positional hockey and trying to take away passing lanes. You can get away with some interference, but you will be called for different types of penalties if you are too blatant.

Flyermania: Is there going to be an "EA Locker" or something like that for users to post and share rosters?

AA: For this year we will not have somewhere where the users can share rosters but it is something that we will look into for future NHL products.

NHL 09 storms onto consoles in two weeks.

Flyermania: How will soundtracks work on the 360? Will a memory card be all that is needed to transfer songs and so forth?

AA: To assign a song to an arena in our stadium Custom Audio feature you will need to have the song added to your XBOX 360 Hard Drive. Then, you will need to make playlists on the 360. From there the user will be able to assign playlists to any arena they want in the game and it will be played when the event that it is linked to happens (i.e. scoring a goal, intro sequence, etc.). It will then be saved for when you want to start a Dynasty and Be a Pro also. If you only want one song to play all the time (when your home team scores for example), just assign one song to that playlist.

So having a music CD and copying the songs to your XBOX 360 hard drive is the best way to transfer songs back and forth. You can copy a song from your XBOX 360 hard drive to your memory unit and transfer it to another XBOX if you choose.

savoie2006: In the EASHL if two players(one from each team) get a penalty, this will result in a 4-on-4 situation. If so, assuming one of the penalized players is a defenseman, who covers his zone? Does the grading system take a situation like this into account? Since a winger has his own positioning normally, is it going to count against him if the winger is covering for a D man in the box?

Sean Ramjagsingh: If a forward is playing defense due to penalties that are being served the player will be graded against being a defenseman for the shifts that he is penalty killing. So a user that plays Right Wing and then gets put on Defense to penalty kill will not receive any grading penalties due to this.