My History of Videogame Hockey

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Been playing videogames for around 25 years and on average between my brothers and I, we bought about 1 hockey game per year. Sucker for annual roster updates? Yup. And so are you, so beat it. Below is my comprehensive….. ok, more like mini-review of each game I played in-depth. I’ll even throw in a few tidbits of games I rented or briefly played.

Where to start? Best game? Worst game? Nope. The easiest way for me to write this fucking blog, you bunch of sweaty crotch grabbers!

Ahhhh…. The beginning of gaming and the start of wasting $1,000s of dollars. But that wouldn’t start until NES. Unlike Atari 2600’s gay 2-on-2 faggy homo Ice Hockey, this game had 3-on-3, 2:00 penalties, slapshots and three 20 minute periods. On paper, great for its time right? Wrong. it was pretty shit. Slow as molasses, the first game had no CPU opponent, the second game had a retarded computer opponent, there were no rules except tripping calls and whichever team had the fucking goalie that fell on his back after each shot always lost. The other goalie would be purposely programmed to be a stonewalling Martin Brodeur. Also, take a look at the pics. Seems crude and acceptable for its time right? Wrong assholes. The first game had a round rink (best it can) and blue lines. The puck would deflect kind of like going around boards unless you shot at the bottom pixel which would result in a complete 180 rebound. Super Pro had green lines and a square rink. Donkey ass American programmers. Shots off the boards would be 180s most of the time. The original NHL had better play and at least the league license. Super Pro had a better cover. NHL Hockey C-, Super Pro Hockey D. Meh

Now we’re talking. Two games on my brother’s Apple II clone - Superstar Ice Hockey and International Hockey. More power, some stat editing and SIH could save stats. A step up from Intellivision right? Wrong. Absolute dung heaps. Also pissing me off is the fact I couldn’t find good images for International Hockey. That’s a crumpled shot from an eBay seller and the game shot is from C64. Superstar Ice Hockey looked like shit. It was 4 colours at most, had almost no sound, the players looked like hunchbacked homos and goals were 100% luck. Penalties were 30 seconds long and time was sped up, so it was literally about 10 seconds real time. If you didn’t get a breakaway on the resulting faceoff, the penalty would be over. Idiots. The redeeming feature was a draft where you could spend skill points boosting player ratings. The gay thing was that a good portion of points depended on your team ranking. The top team got 50 points which is nothing. Each team after got 50 extra, so the last team got around 1,000. International Ice Hockey played bad, but did have a one-on-one shootout mode which was kind of cool, but the goalie had zero intelligence. it was complete luck if it went in. Players shot in 8 directions of course but the angles of your shots were skewed so much, since they compensated for the perspective. A shot from the bottom of the screen rose at a gentle 30 degree angle to the goalie, but a shot from the top angled down at like 170 degrees. That’s some great physics programming there. On a good note, both games were pirated copies, so F.U. Mindscape and Artworx. Superstar Ice Hockey F, International Hockey F. Two turds

Ok. I didn’t get a NES until X-mas ‘87 I think. That means I had been screwing around with shitty hockey games for around 5 years. Nintendo came out the year before, you had fatso Mario jumping turtles and geeks wearing powergloves. Who cares, let’s play some real games. First was Ice Hockey. The cover was so blue it hurt my head and the guy looked like a Rangers castoff. Graphics were fast and typical Nintendo - colourful and non-threatening. However it was fun as hell. You all know it, fat guy with the hard shot ruled, while the speedy Gretzky-looking guy was useless. Technically, it shouldn’t be a good game, but it was. Had some rules like icing, and you could get into scraps. And there was a shootout. Key drawbacks were the visuals and 4-on-4 teams. Colours were way off like Team Canada wearing green and the ref was pink. Months later I rented Blades of Steel. Now we’re talking. Even the title was deathly cool. I think it had 5 player teams, looked realistic and best of all and you love it….. fights. The loser goes to the box. Damn right. The game had some synthesized speech such as the title page and had a Gradius mini-game between periods. And talk about cocky. When you score, your guy stands and raises his stick about 5 ft in the air one-handed! The shot arrow was stupid as the opposing goalie knew where it was going, but who cares. Hockey games finally began being good. Ice Hockey B-, Blades of Steel B+ (actually it’s a B, but I gave a + for the awesome name. If it was called “Blades of Fucking Steel” it would get A+)

Now we’re talking early 90s, the same time I got Genesis. No EA hockeys were out yet, but these two games were on PC. Wayne Gretzky Hockeys - both 1 & 2 - had THE WORST graphics by far. They were literally stick figures that scampered around the ice like ants. The sound was terrible, and the musical jingle (if you had an Adlib sound card) was grating. It had bells and clanking notes in it. The game had so many bugs in it like a cheese goal you stuff in the corner, players scoring on themselves, pucks magically disappearing and reappearing on CPU sticks and even players names being misspelled (Steve Chaissom). But you what? These games were awesome to play. They had real teams, real players, tons of rules, stats like crazy especially if you got the Simulator disk, and you could edit player ratings. Had leaders, standings, salaries, full schedules and playoffs. You could create your own teams and players. Gameplay favoured CPU shooting, including your teammates. You could take 20 shots and get one goal with a “9 shooter”. The CPUs could score 1 out of 10 shots with a “4 shooter”. The smartest thing to do was actually to pass to your CPU teammate for shooting. Kind of gay that way, but you got more pucks in the net. Both games looked the same. I think WGH 1 was CGA only. WGH 2 was EGA. Oh, and there was a WGH 3. We had a copy but it played like shit. You needed 2 meg ram and VGA graphics. It looked similar but played at 2 mph. We didn’t bother playing it as our comp was underpowered. And you think International Hockey’s images were hard to find. I couldn’t find any WGH 3 images on the net. It had the traditional top-down view, PLUS an isometric view like EA’s Genesis games. The box was black with green electrifying fonts. WGH 1 B, WGH 2 A-, WGH 3 D. The EGA upgrade in WGH 2 made a real difference

I bought 4 EA hockey’s, but I can literally write 10 blogs about them. Easily the most fun out of all hockey games ever played. They weren’t the best looking, best sounding or had the most stats, but WOW. The first time I knew about NHL Hockey, I was flipping through some game mag at a store and saw a preview. It was a must-buy. And I did. I’ll always remember the day. We got it on day 1 and it cost $94.99! The game store actually got it from the US, but with currency exchange back then adding about 40-50% to the US price made it almost $100. My bro chipped in $30. Kind of a piss-off that friends got it a week later for $59.99 cdn. Oh well. I got it first and they drooled all week. The first game had no player names and only a playoff format. There were no line changes or manual goalie control. The AI goalie was useless against most shots. Fights were abundant and the best player in the game was no doubt the Kings’ RW #7….. aka Tomas Sandstrom (also an injury plagued pool killer). Every slapshot of his went in. Other notable cheesers were Lemieux and Lafontaine who could score blasts from the blue line. A great point was the out of town highlights. Low point was it was way too easy. A quadriplegic could win his first game. Good starting game, B

Next year was NHLPA ‘93. I guess EA was poor back then because now there were real players, but no real teams. Hooray, I can now play as Long Island. Dumb. The game had battery back up to save lines and stats, but still only a playoff format I think. Fights were a gas. Blood and pure reflex. The bruisers could withstand 7-8 punches, weak guys got flattened in 3 or 4. Graphics and sound were as same as ever, but the AI goalie was noticeably better. Still easy, but not an auto goal. By the way, no more impulse purchases, all EA games from this point on were bought at normal prices. Good game, B+

The series really picked up with NHL ‘94 and ‘95. Key additions were a regular season, one-timers and manual goaltending. ’94’s one timers were almost automatic, but slightly fixed in ‘95. Manual goalies were by far the greatest addition. Against any human player, I could easily get shutouts or at most let in 1-2 goals every game. Poor saps. A FEW HUGE BUGS THOUGH. In one of the games, if your team racked up 128 points in the standings, your team would get put last place in the division and miss the playoffs. So much for beta testing. And next, simmed stats for CPU team players were not determined by name or abilities. It was dependent on where in the roster his name was! That’s right. After testing this with my bro, we verified it 100%. Each team’s roster had a default layout. If the team added or dropped players, now that player’s position could change depending where his name now appears chronologically. Shift Mario Lemieux one spot and his 100 point seasons went to 30. Each team had “roster sweet spots” that would get the goals and assists. Why is this important? Because if you created players or traded them around, those team rosters would fuck up and the star player could end up with shit points. Despite their bug issues, each game was an A-

Battles vs. my brother. No game had such intense rivalries. We shared a season picking different teams and it was a war who would score the most goals and which player would be scoring leader. It was important to score at least 10 goals per game. Games vs. the cpu were automatic wins, so the difference would be the 4 inter-conference games. After a season ended, we’d pick totally different teams and repeat. During one-off games between us, it was a battle of whose manual goaltending was better. All games were 2-1, 2-0 and many 1-0 games. I won more. That’s a fact.

Hmmmmm….. Sega’s World Series Baseball games were fucking awesome. Awesome graphics, stats and digitized speech. Sega is releasing a hockey game called NHL All-Star Hockey 95? Rented it and it sucked harder than a horny breast feeding baby. The visuals when stationary are actually a step up from EA, but in motion, crap. Very floaty. The game was absolute trash. The worst part was that shots had a delayed response. EA’s system made you hold down C and release for the shot. In the meantime, the player actually wound-up as you held down the button. In Sega’s hockey, you pressed, held and released the button…. THEN the player would register and wind up for the shot, so deke goals and tic-tac-toe plays were impossible. Simmed games had all CPU teams scoring 0, 1, or 2 goals mostly no matter what period length you chose. Awful game. Big fat F. Whew, I only rented it……

……. and too bad I didn’t rent this. NHL Stanley Cup - $74.99 down the fucking drain, courtesy of Zelda’s fag-ass Nintendo. OMG, the game has scaling graphics due to a Super FX chip being plunked into it. Oh shit, no more chip, but it still uses rotoscoped graphics. Must be good. Yup. Good for keeping a campfire going. Easily the worst hockey ever. Other games like those Apple games were shit, but at least I got them free. First, this game had no real players, just positions and numbers like EA’s old games. Second, all goals only had 1 assist maximum. Third, the game scrolled at an unplayable rotation. Fourth, there were no dekes, just slapshots. Shots from the blue line went in more than in close. Fifth, bodychecks sent your player literally 100 ft away. Six, horrible sound including only TWO organ tunes played throughout. Seventh, it cost more than EA’s SNES sequel, which I remember being $69.99. Eighth, it tracked no player stats. Ninth, the visuals were so pixellated it might as well be Lite-Brite. And tenth, half the screen was team logos and rafters. Guess what? I wrote those 10 problems in about 2 minutes. Nothing gets worse, F-

Got a PS1 maybe a year after it came out. 32-bit power, CD-based, memory cards, now we got some power to play with. Bought a used copy of NHL Faceoff ‘97 at a now defunct game store for $39.99. Seems like a reasonable price right. Not for me. I hated this game. Sony hadn’t implemented polygons yet in sports games, so it was very blotchy sprites. The game did move fast and smooth though and technically was a decent game. Problem was goals came from tons of one-timers, the CPU mainly went for them with a stupid move where a winger flies down the side, goes in the corner behind the goal line and feeds a player zooming down the centre. Passing was very pinpoint, so the comp scored goals like crazy. My bro kind of liked the game and played it much more. Also, what’s with Paul Coffey on the cover. In 1997, he was about 10 years past his prime! Not a horrific game, but kind of shitty. C-

Wow, I almost forgot, I had rented EA’s NHL ‘97 at some point. EA cancelled their NHL ‘96 for PS1, since things weren’t shaping up. No problem, that’s a good sign for putting more time and effort for next year. Wrong assumption to make. NHL ‘97 was the worst EA hockey ever. The players were so blocky, they were rectangles with skates. I don’t remember much, except it was dreadful.

Looks like I hadn’t bought a full-priced hockey lately and with good reason. I saw someone playing a PS1 demo of NHL ‘98 and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was awesome. It resembled a nicely powered PC version. I remember the acne faced kid say “the game looks like a freaking Pentium 200?. Dork. Polygons, play-by-play commentating, stat tracking, rocking sound and crowds. Bought it pretty quickly. A few aggravating problems though. Gameplay and skating were kind of unresponsive, some cheese goals like shooting on a goalie’s stick side from a sharp angle (the goalie would wave at it), empty net goals were automatic past the red line as it bulls-eyed it’s way to the net, and the goalie could not be scored on from certain angles. Game had a cool CGI intro and it was the first console hockey I played with lengthy stats. Another problem I had was the game would freeze a lot more after I got my system modded. Not my fault. Fucking EA, make your games more compatible with mods. Geez. Solid hockey game. My bro played a lot too. B+

I remember buying my PS2. I didn’t want to pay full price, but found a store selling it used in late 2001 for around $280. I got a used copy of NHL 2002 for I think $50, along with a new NFL 2k2. Since I paid cash, the guy didn’t charge me tax either. Good game store that’s still around. And no, it is not those assholes EB. Soon after I found used copies of Twisted Metal Black and Ace Combat 4 as my starting pack of games. Each one was fun as hell. PS2 was a great system. I had a DVD player already, so I never used it for that, but it had great games and still perfectly works to this day. It was the bulky year 1 version, with no built in ethernet.

Ok, enough humping Sony, off to the hockey games. I played NHL 2002 a lot and finished a season, but I don’t really remember much about it! I know the graphics were decent. It didn’t look spectacular, but ran at a good clip, though definitely not 60 fps. More like 30 fps tops. At this time, EA’s hockey games had all sorts of bubbly filler like achieving points, complete with a big ranging bell when you did it. Points were used to buy player cards in an album, which was 100% useless. Quite tacky. The menu screens were insanely bland and blue, while the actual game was easy as hell. One-timers went in a lot and my top 6 forwards would all get 40+ goals each, with my top guys getting a goal a game. Like every other EA game, west coast dickhead Jim Hughson did the play-by-play droning on with his usual lines. Sure, it was cool hearing him in NHL ‘98, but now? Hire Rick Jeanneret. I played a lot, so it must have been half-decent. B-

I skipped NHL 2003 that had Iginla on the cover. Reviews weren’t too good and I saw a demo running. It looked like shit. I waited till NHL 2004. I got the game with Sakic on the cover. It was originally bucktoothed Heatley, but since he murdered his teammate by speeding and crashing, EA changed covers quickly. Fine with me. Heatley is a jackass and never took responsibility for killing Snyder. No doubt, he paid of his family to keep quiet. It’s amazing how Snyder’s parents sounded like they were on their hands and knees blowing Heatley through the whole thing when it was their son who got crumpled in the car wreck. Money talks. I didn’t play this game much at all. It played even smoother than 2002, but I never got into it. There were a few issues right off the bat that turned me off. First, hearing the track “Oh Ellen” a million times was grating. Two, pucks bouncing off the goalie had a delayed reaction. A split second glitch that looked stupid. You take a 90 mph slapper and it sticks to the goalie pads for a 1/4 second before it redirects to the corner. WTF? That’s some good programming there. Also, goalies let in all sorts of weird goals. Just throw it on net and it might trickle in (shades of NHL 07 on 360). And that repetitive splash screen where your player skates towards you was annoying as hell. I might have played 20 games tops. D+

By the time I got a 360, it had been years since I played a hockey game. I got a 360 in September 2006 and NHL 07 at the same time. I saw the videos on Gamespot, read the previews, saw all the hi-res screens, and read the IGN blog. There is no way NHL 07 could be bad. They even made Ovechkin keep his mouth shut, so nobody would see his bad teeth like Heatley’s cover. NHL 07 wasn’t very good. Not atrocious, but definitely a lower tier game. All those hi-def screenshots were pointless since nobody plays the game close-up. The game moved at about 20 fps maximum and had poor transitioning animation, so it looked worse then it actually was. If you looked at the boards, it scrolled a smooth 30 fps, the player models were at fault. Goalies let in so many tricklers it was moronic. Just get a shot on net and 10% of the time it would flutter in or he’d kick it in himself. Passing and teammate AI was terrible, so setting up plays was non-existent. The point man in the offensive zone was nowhere to be found. And even if you saw him, a pass would some reason whiz past him. One-timers were artificially made hard by purposely making your pass go at 3 mph even if your teammate was open, checking had a magnetic effect too. On the good side, the menu interface looked awesome. Clean, nice fonts and who knew a black and white template would look so good. The Skill Stick was refreshing and did work to some extent. The shootouts were actually great. No game did them like that. EA gets lots of flak, but they do innovate with features, no other company even bothers to try. And possibly the best improvement? Getting rid of Hughson for Thorne and Clement was heaven. C-

As usual, new hockey previews come out in the spring. Will NHL 08 be any good? Who knows. The last bunch of EA games have been watery diarrhea. Hmmmm…. news it out. 60 fps, goalies are fixed, crossover animations, setting up plays is improved, practice mode and more. Typical EA drivel or the real thing? Downloaded the demo and it was fucking good. Sens and Ducks in 5 min periods. Must have played the demo 30 times. Like all sports fans, took the dive and am happy to say NHL 08 is THE BEST HOCKEY GAME EVER. EA didn’t bullshit about their news. They were all true. I’ll get the bad things out of the way first. The computer opponent definitely gets an offensive boost when they are in your zone. Speed, stickhandling, pass are much better than your guys. Sometimes it seems impossible to defend against. You just play the man and hope your goalie makes the save. Also, the game is still relatively easy. I play on All-Star and win most of my games. I know, I can move up to Superstar, but the CPU cheating is just worse. Players often play the same with the same access to dekes. Georges Laraque should not be deking. Lastly, their roster management should give some leeway in the way it handles. When you move or trade players, the roster caps get in the way too much, so you’re forced to do steps like dropping or farming players one at a time first. Good things? Everything else. Graphics, sound, goalies, stats, online play, you name it. For hardcore gamers, they even have real minor league teams. Scoring a goal is an effort and not fluke. I don’t know any cheat goals, bnut there is no way to consistently score tons of goals in this game. I average about 4 goals per game in 10 minute periods. Not bad, since old EA games would be around 10 scores! Even the soundtracks are wicked. Airbourne’s Stand Up for Rock n’ Roll is cool. Another great point about NHL 08…. 360 runs at 60 fps, PS3 at about 20. LOL I’ve seen PS3’s version running and it is a choppy mess. On par with 360’s NHL 07 if not worse! NHL 08 is god, I score it a solid A!

Here’s a few more gaming tidbits to chuck your way. I know 2k fanboys are wondering where my reviews are. I didn’t play them except for a handful of playtests. I rented NHL 2k3 back in the day and thought it was garbage. Aside from the smooth clip, the visuals were trash, the gameplay terrible and goalies impossible to beat. Also, reading forums, the 2k games have been historical bug infestations. No thanks. Recently, I downloaded the 2k8 demo and laughed. Garbage. Constant speed boost and arcade gameplay. So much for sim style 2k games are suppose to be. 2k3/2k8 both score a D

I’m going to end this blog with not a videogame, but a tabletop game. Stiga Hockey. My older bro bought it for us for $100 around 1985-86. What’s so different about this one? We’ll it had 3D plastic players, metal sticks, an electronic scoreboard that played 3 and 5 minute periods and tracked goals. The puck had a magnet in it which would register when it went in the net. It even beeped a warning when a period was ending soon. Leagues better than those tin can versions. My brothers and I played each other. I was the worst. Oh well, fuck Stiga.