NHL 13

NHL 13 is a triumph for feminism.

While the game is little more than a roster update for previous iteration of EA's juggernaut hockey franchise, the game features one new revolutionary roster possibility: the ability to create female players. The female option in the character creation suite logically follows from the game developer's forward thinking efforts to include two renowned real-life women's hockey players—American Angela Ruggiero and Canadian Haley Wickenheiser—as playable characters. Ruggiero is a perennial Team USA standout, and Wickenheiser is a living legend. A four-time winter Olympic gold medalist in ice hockey, Wickenheiser will go down in history as the first woman to score a goal in men's professional hockey. She did so while playing for the Finnish HC Salamat club in 2003. She also went to the Summer Olympics for softball. She's retired from hockey now, and is currently in medical school. What have you done with your life?

Now, faced with all this sheer human will that Wickenheiser embodies, you may be shirking and rationalizing, as people often do when they hear of someone with superior abilities. You may be saying, "well, technically Manon Rheaume was the first woman to play men's hockey, as a goalie in the NHL, no less" just to sort of take Wickenheiser down a peg. But without taking anything away from Rheaume, she played but one period of an exhibition game. While Rheaume was a bit of a sideshow, Wickenheiser had a regular shift.

But Manon Rheaume has left an indelible mark in her own right, at least upon your correspondent. This reviewer must confess that, for whatever reason, all the female players he has created are goalies. Don't think of it as sexism, however—it's far more complicated than that; possibly something to do with the palpable domestic associations of the net, which the goalie "keeps" as if it were a house. Manon Rheaume stands are the archetypal den-mother, the keeper of the net in the fullest sense.

All that being said, the female create-a-player options are limited. While the user may choose from dozens of heads in shaping their male characters, there are only three available for women: pretty blonde with pig-tails, character-nosed brunette with pigtails, and striking woman of African-American descent. Where are redheads? Where are the flowing tresses? The only real modifier is eye-color, and you have a half-dozen or more of those to choose from. It's not really enough, however, to build a team, unless you're content with a preponderance of pig-tailed look-alikes.


While NHL 13 commands high praise for its move toward gender impartiality, the game has all the usual pitfalls of the EA NHL series. It has none of the simplistic, blistering intensity of NHL 94, the remote-past benchmark of the series, as NHL 13 relies on analog-stick shooting, skating and stick-work. This system, while elaborate, relies on improbable feats of stickhandling and reduces a purported hockey “simulation” to a sort of deke-porn mini-game. Play on the equivocal "NHL 94" settings, ostensibly a throwback to the classic game, and your options are limited. The player is left with little control over whether to slap or wrist the puck, as the computer seemingly chooses for you, and stick movement is impoverished. There's not even a turbo button, a staple of EA's 16-bit hockey classics. Since the AI plays defensively, consistently shutting off the interior of its own zone, you'll mostly have to settle for long shots, and games will inevitably turn into defensive struggles, the winner usually determined by lucky goals. But then again, doesn't this sound like an accurate simulation of present-day NHL hockey: vigorously conservative and defensive with winners and losers largely determined by bounces?

The only consolation is that the game includes a version of Wayne Gretzky convincing in both the looks and talent departments who's available right out of the box. In this way, NHL 13 hearkens back to a more compelling NHL of yesteryear. Maybe it’s the promises of a more compelling NHL of the future that makes features like the inclusion of female characters in NHL 13 so appealing. These exemplary women allow us the fantasy that hockey is capable of being changed.