PowerPlayGoal.com – Hockey From A Different Angle

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

Overview

The beginning of the nineties brought us many classic games. 1993 brought us exciting 3d first person shooter Doom, Nintendo gave us the ever entertaining Super Mario World in 1990 and EA introduced us to their take on hockey for the first time in “NHL Hockey”, in 1991.
However amongst all these amazing, ground-breaking and revolutionary games; smaller funded developers still found time, and room in the market place to push out the worst video games imaginable.
One of these awful games is the “excitingly” named Solar Hockey League Hockey.
The description from the read me that came inside the game file says:

After the latter half of the 21st century, which had North America playing a

very minor role both politically and economically, there was a worldwide

(solar-system-wide actually) revival of ancient North American sports in the

22nd century, most notably of ice hockey. But in accordance with the true

spirit of the time, the players in the game were actually robots, controlled

externally by teams of humans. The sport, originated among American immigrants

in southwestern South America, proved to be very popular, especially in the

various human colonies on planets in the solar system. Now you have a chance

to challenge the teams in the Solar Hockey League.

Did that make you excited to play it? Did it make much sense to you? No?  Oh well, that’s a shame. It really is…

Gameplay

The game starts with a rather tacky splash screen featuring the name of the game, a sun, and what I presume is either a comet or solar flare flying through the air. To be entirely honest, it looks to me like a sperm on fire, but I am sure that’s one of those Freudian things.
After this delightful splash screen, we are greeted with a not so stylish menu.
Optioion 1 changes the home team, and Option 2 changes the away team. Laughably, it is possible to have a 2 player game, even though the controls are spread all over the keyboard, and there’s no mouse support. I wouldn’t get too excited about choosing what team you want to play as though, if you actually want to be able to play, you need to set your team as “human team”.
The teams you can play against (or watch play if your weird) are:
Phobos Miners, Titan Orange, Pluto IceMen, Neptune Blue, Saturn Ringers, Juipter Magnos, Mars Reds, Moon Minerals, or Earth Mutants.
After making your selection from the “creatively” named teams, you can choose to play a single game, or torture yourself by playing a league series (why oh why).
Additionally, you can return to dos (the best option really), change the player speed from slow to fast, or back again; toggle sound, change the colour of the rink from green to purple, cyan or randomise it.
Finally, you can also change the game length. What time measurement scale it uses I am not certain, all I know is the length is defaulted to 4000.
Choosing to play a single game takes you instantly to the game play screen, which I would assume is the developers 4 bit vision of a future rink. The sounds the game plays from here onwards are awful, sounding much like a dishwasher that’s going wrong.
The controls are standard, enter to shoot, arrow keys to move your player. It is not possible to change player in the game, and it seems to allow you to move whoever is nearest the puck. There’s no real passing system built in, so you just have to shoot the puck and hope that your player square picks it up.
The game will freeze on scoring a goal for a few seconds breaking up the game play, but besides that it plays much like every other poorly made and coded hockey, soccer, basketball, whatever sports game from this era.
The interface is hideous, and to make it worse you have the most unimaginitve sprites ever. A square with a circle inside it, and a donut shaped sprite plays the role of the puck. It is awful even by 1992 standards.
Playing the league option is exactly the same as above, except it shows a leaderboard before each game. It has space to 10 games, but I could never imagine anyone getting past 2, maybe even 1 without deleting the game from their system and lying to anyone about having ever played it.
Whats worse I think is not only does the game have lousy graphics, gameplay and sound effects, but such a cheesy and lame storyline about a futuristic hockey league originating in South America.

Screenshots

Conclusion

To conclude, this game is awful. Im aware its shareware, and I am aware the developer was only asking for $10 to register so you can recieve a floppy disk copy, but it really is awful.
This is just another example of the best things in life not being free.
In a time where graphics started to look acceptable and games started to become imaginative; this game really shows up how awful some games of that era really were.
Should you wish to find out how bad this game is, you’ll want DOSbox, and the game file, but first, tell me why!

Rating: 1/10 – Painful

Additional mentions
The game includes a short story of its history, which I found quite entertaining:

This game was first written under the imaginative name of ‘BALL’ in 1989,

featuring CGA graphics designed for monochrome monitors, delays only suitable

to slow XT computers and an internal ‘random’ routine that doesn’t work on

AT’s. Despite this, it was included in the ‘Best of 1990′ selection of the

Public (Software) Library in Houston, TX. Now, in 1992, the game has been

upgraded and runs nicely on any modern IBM PC compatible computer, with

greatly enhanced graphics and presentation (although the graphics are still

monochrome – but with varying color schemes this actually looks quite nice on

EGA/VGA color displays). It was written entirely in assembler (some 7000

lines).

Welcome to Epic Fail, the new PowerPlayGoal.com section that ignores all the glory and teary eyed victories to focus on one thing – Failure.

What happens when, some movie execs run short on ideas, money and decide one drunken night to once again re-animate the corpses careers of the Hansen brothers?

You get another straight to DVD movie based on the classic Slap Shot movie of course.

This time, its not about an adult team, but a youth one – and despite the very notion that this is a HOCKEY movie, it features surprisingly very little hockey actually being played.
Improvising for the writers lack of originallity, the movie uses the only “successful” hockey movie concept; the one invented by Disney. The basic story: Once again the bad guys are in town, and unsurprisingly the only thing that can stop them is a youth hockey team. Throw in a few tragedy’s, maybe some heartwarming moments of “friendship” and “teamwork” and perhaps even some anti-capitalist agenda and you have this movie.
This proves that once again, sequels, threequels or whatever you call them should NOT be made, ever.

Comments placed on review websites from members of the public include:

- Wow, what a wonderful tribute to the memory of the great Paul Newman… poor bastard must be spinning over in his grave!

- Slap Shot 3 is, simply put, what happens when someone wanting a quick buck tries to apply the paradigm from The Mighty Ducks but is as skillful in exposition as the writers for KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

And my personal favourite from IMDB:

- I wish IMDb would let me rate this film a zero. I saw this movie, being a loyal fan of the original. I also thought nothing could be worse than Slap Shot 2 with Stephen Baldwin. I was sorely mistaken. Not only is this a failed attempt at an underdog sports movie, but it misses the spirit of the original as well. Characters are cardboard and the plot was a thinly veiled sequel to the Mighty Ducks. How little respect to producers have for the sport that they don’t do any research? A rag tag bunch of ball hockey players joining a (“the”) Junior League? The Hanson brothers need to stop soiling their legacy and stick to state fairs and minor league hockey intermissions.

So, as you can see – it is a tragic failure.
This failure however could well be a small stepping stone for the planned remake of the original Slap Shot movie, which is to be directed by Dean Parisot – “acclaimed” director of “epic” movies such as “Fun with Dick and Jane” and “Galaxy Quest”.
Personally, I am now in favour of banning any new hockey movies to be made, unless they are directed by Oliver Stone. If he could make a Hockey movie as great as the football flick “Any Given Sunday” was; the audience would be in for a treat!

Check your local 99 cent stores for copies of this movie today!

Im KevKev, and Slap Shot 3 is our first of many epic fails.