This year, EA Sports is offering up NHL 11, promoted as the most realistic Hockey Game EVER MADE.  Broken Sticks and Faceoff shoving and all sorts of stuff that’s supposed to make the game seem more realistic.  Oh, and a whole bunch of new teams that most people who play this game will never, ever play with.

So, I was thinking, I’ve played a lot of hockey video games in my young life.  I haven’t played them ALL, but I’ve played enough.  Would you like to read a small chronology of hockey video games?  NO?  Well, too bad, you are already intellectually committed!  READ ON!!

NHL 94 (SNES): At the risk of sounding like an asshole video game writer, “this is the one that started them all.”  Seriously, it was.  There hadn’t been a hockey game before that came this close to replicating the real thing (fuck Blades of Steel).  It had all of the real, actual NHL teams, and all of the real, actual NHL stars.  Up until a month ago, I hadn’t played this game in 15 years, and I had forgotten several things about it.  One, how goddamned good the Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins were in 1993.  Two, how goddamned HARD it was to set up any respectable play in this game.  And Three, how godawful the Philadelphia Flyers were in 1993.  NHL 95 was basically the same game, but with the ability to edit rosters.

NHL 96 (PC): The appeal of this game was that it was the first hockey game in “3D.”  And when I mean 3D, I mean they used sprites and shit.  I played it a few times for the PC, and I wasn’t too thrilled with it.  To be fair though, I played it after…

NHL 97 (PC): For the longest, longest time, this was my favourite hockey game.  EA Sports made a real winner when they made this.  Play-By-Play commentary, World teams, and real, actual goalie masks.  OH, and the gameplay was pretty damned good.  I used to play the hell out of this on my old Packard Bell, playing season after season with a Philadelphia Flyers team that included Mark Messier, Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, and Curtis Jospeh in net.  Yeah, I stacked the fuck out of my team.  One thing that I wish the kept from this game, for future games, is the ability to edit All Star rosters during season mode.

NHL 97 (SNES): In the final years of the SNES and 16 Bit systems, all you could get were sports games.  NHL 97 for the SNES is no match for NHL 97 for the PC.  Totally stripped down, and basically a clone of NHL 1995.  All I remember from it is that the Phoenix Coyotes were unreasonably good.

Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey (N64): This game is garbage.  Absolute garbage.  It was garbage when I first played it in 1997, and it’s still garbage, half an hour prior to me writing this here article on hockey games.  The controls make absolutely no sense (The “Pass” button is always, ALWAYS the “Change Player” button too, you assholes…), the graphics are hideous, even for 1997 3D technology, and the gameplay just fucking sucks.   Players move at breakneck speed, goal scoring happens at random, and I’m quite certain that the people who made this game had never watched a hockey game in their life (for instance, players who skate over the blue line before the puck are called for “Offsides.”). You cannot even pick your opponent, for fuck’s sake!

NHL 99 (N64): Yeah, fuck Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey Game.  At least this one actually looks like fucking hockey!  And you can actually kind of, sort of set up plays!  The graphics aren’t pretty, and the play-by-play makes me want to slash Bill Clement’s throat, but it was a vast improvement.

NHL 2K3 (GameCube): For a few years, I fell out of touch with Hockey.  Life wasn’t going so well, and the Wrestling boom completely distracted me from everything else.  This game helped bring me back into my Hockey fandom.  This was also the only time I can remember having fun whilst playing a game made by 2K Sports.  The only thing I recall hating about this game was the atrocious play-by-play.  HE MUST HAVE PUCK MAGNETS IN THOSE GLOVES!  HE MUST HAVE PUCK MAGNETS IN THOSE GLOVES!

NHL 06 (GameCube): Back in the EA Sports fold, this was the first EA NHL series I had played in a decade (I had only recently come into possession of NHL 99).  Stuff like Dynasty Mode were completely new concepts to me, which completely won me over.  My fondest memory of this game happened this one time, when a friend of mine and I beat the Phoenix Coyotes 62-1.  I’m serious.

NHL 09/10 (PS3): Basically the same game.  While gameplay is good, pretty damn good actually, there are some things I hate about these two games.  One thing, is its piss-poor Create A Team function.  In NHL 06, there were SO many options.  Instead, NHL 09/10 seemed to have had this mode stripped, in favour of having several European elite leagues for North Americans to NOT play with.  Another thing is Be A Pro, which seems like it is IMPOSSIBLE to make happy.  Also, their Create-A-Player function makes absolutely no goddamned sense.

So, yeah.  That’s a brief history of me and hockey games.  One of the good things about hockey games, from what I understand, is that they’re pretty consistent, unlike, say, wrestling games.  However, I am also made to understand that being consistent is also a bad thing in video games, which makes absolutely no goddamned sense.  In short, I will buy NHL 11, and I will take the Flyers and stampede to the Stanley Cup in Dynasty mode, and I will, no doubt, trade up to NHL 12 this time next year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Games, Hockey, Retro Gaming, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.