Ice Hockey (NES) – Retro Review
Ice Hockey (NES)
During the 80’s, as well as smash hits such as the Super Mario Bros. series, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, Nintendo also produced a series of sports games for its NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) console, with one of them being a game based around ice hockey, fittingly named Ice Hockey. Released in 1988, and featuring international teams, its release was seemingly tied in with the 1988 Winter Olympics. With the 2010 winter games being just around the corner, I saw it fitting to review this game now.
I was too young to have ever owned a NES back in the day, so I recently bought and downloaded it from the Wii online shop instead. Keep reading to see if I think this was a worthy purchase, or a waste of my 500 Wii points…
Presentation
When you turn on the game for the first time, you get a fairly standard title screen with a short little tune playing, and if you don’t select anything after a few seconds the game will go straight into a demo. On the title screen, you’re given two options: a one player game, and a two player game. From there, you can select your team, which team you will play against, as well as the game speed (from a choice of 1-5) and a time limit for each period (7, 10 or 15 minutes). Once that’s done and before the game starts, you can adjust your team’s lineup, made up of four players of up to three different players types (which I’ll talk about a bit later), and then the game will begin.
Graphics are fairly decent, and for a NES game they are generally what you’d expect. They aren’t the most bright and colourful in a videogame, since the majority of the time you’ll be seeing the big, white rink take up most of the screen, but since rinks are usually white anyway, that’s not really something to complain about. The rink basically looks as you’d expect it to in real life, and there are even a couple of Nintendo logos on the ice. The scoreboard seems to be built into the top of the rink, and serves its purpose well.
To make up for the seeming lack of colours, each of the six nations you can play as are represented by a different colour as follows: the USA (light blue), Sweden (yellow), Poland (brown), Canada (light green), the Soviet Union/Russia (Red) and Czechoslovakia (Gray). I’m not sure why, but for the Virtual Console version of this game, Sweden looks pale green while Poland looks dark green, but then only a small few of the NES games I’ve downloaded are perfect conversions of the originals.
Much like the graphics, sounds are just as you’d expect from an older videogame, but for a hockey game they work surprisingly well: among the many sound effects, you will hear things like the crowd, the referee’s whistle, the sound of a puck being shot, and when you pause the game you will hear a familiar sound from the Super Mario games.
At the end of each period, you’ll see one of the strangest looking Zambonis I’ve ever seen driving up and down the ice. It doesn’t beat Hat Trick’s “Nazi War Machine” as far as weirdness goes, but it looks like a steamroller tank thing being driven by a goalie.
Gameplay
With the NES having just two buttons as well as the D-Pad, the controls are simple but effective, although at first they’ll take a moment to get used to. For those who have picked up the original cartridge from eBay or something without instructions, the B and A buttons (1 and 2 on Wii) will respectively control shooting and passing when in possession of the puck, while on defence they will be used for switching players on your team, and body checking the rivals.
As mentioned earlier, when adjusting your team’s lineup you get a choice of up to three different player types to fill the four available spaces. They aren’t anything like the wingers or defensemen in real life hockey, but rather they are different weight classes: you’ll get the skinny lightweight player: very fast but gets pushed about easily; the fat heavyweight: strong but fairly slow; and finally the middleweight: who as his name suggests sits comfortably in the middle. Expert players may be able to take advantage of the lightweight’s high speed, while others may tend to use an all-heavyweight team and run the opponents down. Of course, as well as the four players in your lineup, you will also have a goaltender.
Unlike many other hockey games that followed, this game does not use cursors to show which player you are currently controlling, instead, the currently selected player for either team will flash, kind of like when Mario is invincible in his earlier games. When you pass the puck to another player, he will start flashing instead. Note that as well as the player, you will also be in control of your team’s goalie: simply press up and down to move him.
Once you get used to the controls, you’ll find that the game moves nice and fast, even at the lowest speed setting. And since there’s no real way to adjust the game’s difficulty, it’s deceptively hard the first time you play. Shots take a moment to charge up, so you’ll actually have to hold the B button for a moment, and then let go to send the puck flying. But you’ll need plenty of space to do so, as other players can easily slam into you and snatch the puck away. Sometimes you can fight another player for puck possession, which can sometimes lead to a funny little brawl, complete with a cartoony dust cloud that will send at least one player to the penalty box.
Lasting Appeal
Unlike the many hockey games that came after it, this game isn’t very deep, and only has the basic one or two player modes to choose from. What it lacks in depth however, it more than makes up for being very addictive, and that alone will keep you coming back time and time again.
Overall
While there are a few minor control related niggles, this game is still very fun to play, even though it’s the most simple and basic hockey game out there. If you have a Wii with access to the internet, go ahead and buy this game. If you have an old NES lying around, dust it off and get this game from eBay. As for how this game compares to Konami’s Blades of Steel, also available on the NES and the Wii’s Virtual Console service, I can’t say anything at the moment since I haven’t played it properly yet, so that’ll be a review for another time.
Rating: 7/10 “Addictive”