Unfortunately, it seems that pretty much all of the recent EA sports games have alluded all of us. I tried like hell to edit the .exe of NBA Live 06 to get it to go to widescreen. I know a lot of others have tried too. They simply won't budge from their 4:3 aspect ratios and resolutions. I am guessing you are going to have as tough a time with NHL 06.
EA Sports will hopefully come around to supporting WS as the new consoles are WS native. But then again, it wouldn't surprise me if EA Sports dropped WS support on the PC in titles that support it on the Xbox 360. :evil:
What we need is for 2k games to start making their sports titles for the PC as well so we can all move on and never have to hear "EA Sports.... it's in the game" ever again!
In one of the viv files in NHL2006, it controls all of the resolution settings in the game, i'll try to see if I can find out which one it was.
In terms of EA vs. 2K... I have to say I've never liked the gameplay of a 2K game over an EA game.. their sim management parts are always better, but the gameplay isn't always a mix that works unless you are a hardcore gamer who only likes to play by yourself or online (and not with your casual gamer friends). That being said, EA screwed up with NHL 06, the defense and goalie AI was much better in 2005, the only thing that was bad was the magnetic powerful checks. If they had only fixed that and kept the defense/goalie AI intact and not made them dummies, the game would have been great.
I think EA's games will support widescreen next year anyway; I was in downtown Toronto on Friday and I passed this store which was selling a 19" widescreen LCD for like $300 CDN. Now I'm not sure if thats a normal price (I haven't kept up with the hardware market) or if it's a bad quality model, but with prices like that, everyone is eventually gonna go to widescreen in the next few years.