Good Old Hockey Game

Oh! The good old hockey game,
Is the best game you can name;
And the best game you can name,
Is the good old Hockey game!
- Stompin’ Tom Connors

This evening I got the opportunity to play some classic hockey on the Sega Geneses (NHL 95) and somewhat newer hockey on the original Xbox (NHL 2004, NHL 2005) at C2’s house. I then got to play some Wii for the second time in my young life which will be the focus of another post.

It was a blast to re-live my youth with hockey on the Genesis with it’s crappy controls and very pixelated graphics. It didn’t help that C2’s TV is like 50 inch wide screen or something ridiculously big. It is weird seeing teams that don’t exist anymore such as the Quebec Nordics, Winnipeg Jets, and Hartford Whalers and players that no longer play such as Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, etc. The game play is very slow, which wasn’t obvious till we moved up to NHL on the Xbox in which the game play was much quicker.

One thing the older hockey games had going for them was simplicity. With only 3 buttons on the Sega controller there was not a lot of options, it really boils down to a couple simple actions:

• Pass

• Shoot

• Change Player

• Body Check

I think there might have been a poke check or something but that never gets used unless your an “Advanced” player. When playing video hockey it is all about the hitting when you don’t have the puck and shooting/passing when you do. The Xbox controller has a lot of buttons on the top, two analog sticks, and 2 trigger buttons. Aside from the standard 4 actions listed above the buttons preform exotic actions such as:

• Block Shot

• Hook

• Spin Deke

• Hold Against the Boards

• Triple Axel Sow-Cow

The list goes on and on. Unless you have time to remember what all the buttons do you just revert to the 4 basic actions from old school hockey.

So designers of hockey games (I’m looking at you EA) make the 4 basic hockey actions easy to do and work fairly well. That way when a newbie like me is over at a buddies house I can have fun and be competitive without having to read and memorize the manual.