512th played so far
Genre: Sports
Platform: Mega Drive
Year of Release: 1991
Developer: Park Place Productions
Publisher: EA Sports
Time for another sports game – hockey again. NHL Hockey, unlike its more recent brother NHL 10, has stayed on the list of games – as you’d expect from an older game, really.
I can’t say much more about the game, as ice hockey isn’t my thing and I’ve never had a reason to play it… We’ll just need to see.
Our Thoughts
As is always the issue with sports games, if you don’t know the sport a large part of the game can be, or at least starts off pretty impenetrable. NHL 10 prepared us a bit for NHL Hockey, but more mercifully, NHL Hockey is a lot simpler (as always) which helps a lot getting into the game. Even so, my goal became just ‘get to the goal to score’ without much knowledge of strategy, making me feel like I’m missing a lot of the game, but also not being at a point where I know how to discover more.
It meant that while the game was fine and a bit of a challenge, it got boring and flat early on, while I didn’t know enough about it to appreciate any depths of the game – I’m not sure how different this really would be from a football game, just without the ball being able to leave the field.
It struggles more with player selection than most games – although I suspect that’s a problem I won’t ever see fixed. Here, however, even when you expect to jump closer to the puck, you don’t always do so (and I’m not sure if you could). Only when you own the puck do you know you’ll get that player’s control, but beyond that you could well expect to end up at the other side of the field from where the action is going on.
Final Thoughts
I don’t think I’ll ever quite get to grips with these sports games. Partially I don’t see the point as I don’t know the sports, but unlike with other control methods, I haven’t gotten to grips with this after all these years of playing games for the blog. But yeah, for the most part I don’t care about the game – it’s entertaining enough for a little while, but doesn’t get me going further.