Face Off! (Gamestar Hockey League) – Retro Review
So you’ve played the NHL, the AHL and heck even the OHL, but they’ve never satisfied your craving for hockey – so, I would like to present you with the alternative; The Gamestar Hockey League (GHL).
Published and released in 1989 by Gamestar, developed by Mindspan; and it was released on both Commodore 64 and Microsoft DOS.
This games roots are from Canada, so they should know what they are doing. Right?
The game starts off with the usual tacky late 80’s splash screen. On it, 3d text rotates in displaying the games name, beneath, is a goalie half wearing an old mask displaying some kind of injury; Im thinking its supposed to be a black eye.
This screen then begins to play the games credits and will continue to loop until you press a key.
Pressing a key takes you to a “pop trivia” page, asking you a question about hockey.
However, rather than use real life hockey for its questions, it bases its questions upon the fictional league created by the game, the GHL.
I imagine that entering the correct answer unlocks something, however because I have no clue how to answer:
“What year was Marcel Alamode inducted into the GHL hall of fame”, or “What was Espy Phillips” best year” or even “How many times did Gordon Howie” play, I could not find out what happens.
The next screen is the menu, with 3 choices – Exhibition Game, League Play and Adjust Joystick.
First off I chose Exhibition Game.
The menu on choosing this allows you to choose from a team from either the Eastern or Western conference; and the city names that you can choose from seem about accurate from this games era.
The next step asks you to choose a few settings, including what controls each player is going to use, and even the option to work together with player 2. You can additionally choose the number of players per team (2,4 or 6), choose Full Rules, Relaxed rules or Aussie Rules; change game speed, difficulty and even goalie control.
The next screen allows you to start the game, change the lines and even goes further to allow changes to the playbook and create new plays.
After customising the game to your standards, you are free to play the game.
The graphics of the game are by 1989 standards, pretty decent. The player sprites are a little on the generic side, all looking the same (blame a lack of computers memory), however there are plenty of colours; its easy to differentiate what teams are playing and the surrounding crowd, boards around the rink and even the arena look quite pleasant. They have even chucked a ref in to complete the “realism”.
However, this praise is short lived, as we realise the controls for the game are needlessly complicated. You choose what player y0u want at face off, and then proceed to play as that player until play stops. The controls are unresponsive, and dotted all around the keyboard making it very hard to play the game well. When you activate player goalie control, it gets even more confusing as the goalie has his own set of controls. I can’t help but feel this game really would enjoy having a joystick to make playing easier – but as I have no access to one, and am certain many people out there don’t.
Sound effects in game are pretty poor, with the generic buzz sound from retro games making a common appearance whenever you score, shoot or get checked. This is interlaced with “ragtime era” style piano music, and is definably the games weakest point.
Actual gameplay feels good, the players seem to move around fairly well, the game has a slight over tendancy to give out penalties, and shooting is a real hit or miss situation; as it winning a face off .
At the end of a period you get fairly detailed information about the game, including penalty time, shots and a scoring summary.
The league play function takes the above gameplay into a season format, with a myriad of options being made available to the player; including the amount of intra-division and intra-conference games in a season and how the playoffs will run. The gameplay is as exhibition mode.
Overall, this game is not bad. The graphics are good for the era and whilst the player sprites feel a little lacking in detailed they look good as does the rink and crowd. The league mode is fairly customisable and definably has potential to last you a long time.
The games experience is let down on a few small points however, one being the slightly weird controls, and another being the strange questions it asks you on startup. The games music is also another low point, with me resorting to muting my laptop during this review – It really is awful.
Final Verdict: 5/10 – Not Bad
I’m KevKev, this is PowerPlayGoal.com
