NHL 2001 for PlayStation is to hockey video games what an eighth generation VHS copy of game three of the 1987 Canada Cup Finals is to actual hockey. Experienced today, they both look like absolute shit, yet they are still both great hockey games.
Like many games of the PS1/N64 era, EA's NHL 2001 has not aged well. This is a symptom of its generation. While many 16 bit games still remain highly satisfying in terms of graphical style and gameplay, as do games of the XBox/PS2 era and beyond, the early polygonal forays that graced the PS1 and N64 must be placed in a category like unto that of games from the Atari 5200 and ColecoVision era. Apart from a few gems, the majority of games originating in the pre-8-Bit and 32-bit eras are unplayable. In each case, programmers were still learning the capabilities of the technology—2D and 3D, respectively—and were far from perfecting their craft. Sports games from these eras, although separated by roughly two decades, were at best abstract simulacra of the sports we love (that is, love enough to play while seated with a controller in hand).
But even to say NHL 2001's graphics have not aged well is to run roughshod over the fine art of understatement. The game's visuals are, to the contemporary eye, comically awful. The players are tottering polygon people—some kind of humanoid species, pigeon-toed with long, rectangular limbs caving into squarish torsos. The animation, meanwhile, is jerky and unearthly, making the gait of the players almost Slenderman-esque. Programmers of the PS1 NHL games seemed at least somewhat cognizant of the sorry state of the graphics. When fights break out, for instance, the combatants stand altogether inert save for their arms, which piston horizontally not unlike Rock Em Sock Em Robots. In an apparent self-parody, every landed punch occasions a cartoonish whapping sound.
Now, your correspondent realizes that hindsight makes unbiased appraisal of the past impossible, yet when one observes how awful these graphics are, it provokes the question: how we did not recognize the ugliness of NHL 2001 when the game was still relevant? How did we accept NHL 2001 as hockey? Of course, back then, we had yet to meet Slenderman, so we couldn't use that particular metaphor so as to disparage the character models with precision. Even with that taken into consideration, the game barely resembles hockey, and yet it nonetheless managed to get heralded as one of the better hockey games of its time. Why is this?
The answer is, quite simply, because the game is engaging. The pacing is excellent, and the control scheme is simple, very close to NHL 94 but enhanced just enough that you can be turning Savardian spinaramas with no more than a tap of the L1 button. Also, dashing forwards are eminently able to score from the slot, which has been hit-or-miss in present-day NHL games, where it's hard to even get into the slot without pulling off a series of miraculous dekes. Given the fast-paced gameplay, NHL 2001 could be called arcadey, but this isn't the best descriptor. The game is not even best characterized as hockey qua hockey, but rather as mutant hockey (not to be confused with Mutant League Hockey), a game of frantically guiding a rectangular blob down a sheet of ice so pixelated it looks craggy. But this is not unenjoyable. In fact, the game is fun, not quite in the way that later hockey sims like NHL 2K5 were fun, but fun the way Pong Hockey was fun. That strain of fun has more to do with sheer reflex and sweaty-palmed impulse than anything to do with the NHL. And yet oddly enough, in typical EA fashion, all of hockey's ancillary features are here in NHL 2001, among them a deadpan stadium announcer, obnoxious goal horns and canned jock-rock; the contrast between the realism of the arena sensorium and the manic surrealism of the gameplay is somewhat jarring.
All told, what NHL 2001 offers is definitely hockey-ish, making NHL 2001 the most enjoyable game of quasi-hockey available for the PS1. So while game three of the 1987 Canada Cup on VHS doesn't really resemble present-day hockey, it's still entertaining. The same goes for NHL 2001, which, though it fully feels like gazing into a bygone era—if not an alien planet—in terms of both hockey and video-gaming, is still fun to play. The same can't always be said for the overcomplicated stickhandling porn that continues to bear the NHL label year after year.