Olympic Hockey Nagano 98

Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 for the N64 embodies unrepentant exploitation of the highest order, though with that being said, it is not particularly good exploitation. Publisher Midway took the middling N64 puck proffering Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, re-skinned the teams with international vestments, but didn't bother to make any improvements to the game in the process, all in hopes of getting it out in time for the Nagano Olympics.

As such, the flaws of Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 are largely those of Gretzky's 3D. Most egregiously, the game defaults to manual player switching—that is to say, without turning this off, you're stuck with the player you choose at the start of the period, which makes passing or even following the puck-carrier up ice far more difficult than it should be. Hockey video games should always allow you to control the puck carrier; this is not a point of debate. As such, expect a lot of off-sides and icings until you finally toggle player switching to “on”. On the sonic side, Olympic Hockey also features the usual Midway announcer, a generic radio type paid to lend his jack-of-all-trades Stentorian voice to hockey. It is not commentary he offers, but rather stale chestnuts like "What goaltending!" and "Robin Hood and his merry men are up to it again", phrases respectively overused for great saves and turnovers in the previous Gretzky games. Graphically, Olympic Hockey retains Gretzky's jejune color palette, bright reds and yellows and greens, all atop bluish ice. Natural ice has a bluish hue, yes, but hockey ice is white, Midway, and it is painted as such. The teams, as you might imagine, are truly slapdash, their uniforms not corresponding to actual IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation) logos of the time but instead consisting simply of the flag of the nation in question pasted over the attendant colors. The Canadian team even has white pants, an unprecedented uniform choice in men's hockey.

What would Gretzky have to do

To don to Kazakh greenish-blue?

Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 is not entirely devoid of merit. It features, for instance, an option for trading players, which may seem odd for a game in which players represent their countries of origin. Here, Midway did come through with an innovation, renaming "trades" as "defections." Now, instead of selecting the players you wish to trade, you select the country you wish to “defect” from, and then the nation to which you wish to "apply for asylum". This makes for some interesting ludo-narrative scenarios. What would Wayne Gretzky, a national icon of near demi-god status in the Great White North, have to do to have to defect from Canada and apply for asylum in some place like Kazakhstan? One would assume it would involve at least a #MeToo-related transgression, or more realistically some kind of pedophilia, perhaps. In this way, Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 raises some intriguing hypothetical questions.

Speculations about Wayne Gretzky's sexual proclivities are not enough to save Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98, however, for the game fails on too many other levels. Midway tried to exploit the 1998 Nagano Olympics, but they wound up failing even in the art of exploitation. The fundamental maxim of exploitation is that you can judge a book (or a movie, or a video game) by its cover. Instead of gracing the cover with a Gretzky or a Hull—hockey standouts from the two countries representing the most viable markets for the game—Midway instead decided to go with a generic Russian goaltender for its box art. Sorry Midway, but that Cyrillic script written on that goalie's jersey—the authentic Russia jersey, I might add—branded your game as a write-off right from the get-go.