NHL Stanley Cup

If you'll indulge him, your correspondent will begin this review with an autobiographical sketch. The year was 1993. Your late-adolescent correspondent was in Wal-Mart (perhaps it was Wool-co at that point), and in the aisle leading to the electronics section, a promotional booth had been set up. The booth had a large TV screen and a Super Nintendo under the giant cardboard logo with the blown-up title and box-art of a game: NHL Stanley Cup. The store employee running the display booth called me over and suggested I take a turn what she described as the "best hockey video game," or something to that effect.

"But I already have NHL 94," your correspondent remarked, not as a crack-back but rather in that innocent, matter-of-fact way that incorrigibly earnest children have.

"Oh no," said the store-appointed spokes-lady. "NHL Stanley Cup is much better."

Your correspondent was unconvinced but not un-intrigued. The demo clips from NHL Stanley Cup that played on the giant screen drew the eye. The sprites were big, and, more jarringly, the game was played at ice-level in what appeared to be 3D. This was completely unlike NHL 94. But could it possibly be better?

In hopes of answering this question, your correspondent waited by the booth as the god-bless-her-she's-trying spokes-lady attempted to flag down another customer. Eventually, she commandeered an older boy—a taller boy—who was red-faced and trim, who looked like he might even play some hockey himself. Smilingly, he picked up the controller, and we started into a game.

Your correspondent and the older boy played through one period of arduous lumbering and puck-chasing. They each had a few good scoring chances in front of the net, but neither could put the puck home. The goalies were too good. The period ended scoreless.

The spokes-lady took the liberty of declaring the older boy the winner. She based this on the fact that he had had more shots on goal. Your correspondent drifted away the loser, but not exactly feeling like he had lost. He only felt like he wanted to play NHL 94.

In retrospect, your correspondent is not convinced that that compulsion to play NHL 94 was the sour grapes of a child who had been "defeated." It was more likely the nascent discrimination of a discerning gamer in the making. That said, one does not have to be particularly discerning to realize that NHL Stanley Cup is inferior to NHL 94. In retrospect, your correspondent feels a measure of pity for that Wal-Mart (or Wool-co) spokes-lady. She'd been saddled with the ultimate tough sell: pitting the mediocre NHL Stanley Cup against NHL 94, widely agreed to be the greatest sports game of ever released.

If judged by the cover, which formed the backdrop of the display booth in that aisle, NHL Stanley Cup promises exhilaration. In a scene that could have been taken from the 1993 Stanley Cup Finals, the cover drawing depicts a generic blond member of the Los Angeles Kings skating in on the Montreal Canadiens’ goalie. The subtext is that the latter is Patrick Roy, though it's not really Patrick Roy because NHL Stanley Cup did not have an NHLPA license. Sweat is beading on the brow of the Kings' attacker (too blond and handsome to be Gretzky) as he follows through with a snap-shot, which has already been kicked away by the twine-minder.

Unfortunately, this cover drawing is more exciting than anything that ever happens in NHL Stanley Cup itself. The game is based entirely around dump-and-chase, the boring style of hockey that became more commonplace in the NHL post-1993. In that sense, NHL Stanley Cup was ahead of its time, but not in a positive way. Indeed, it's full of the boring 1-0 and 2-1 games that defined pro hockey for the next decade. And as per that scoreless period played between your correspondent and the older, taller, red-faced boy, the game is irredeemably boring. The Mode 7, pseudo-3D graphics catch the eye at first, but they quickly grow tiresome and bewildering. 3D scaling may have worked for NCAA Final Four, on the grounds that changes of possession in basketball are generally tied to scoring plays, but it renders the game of hockey, where possession-changes are fluid and constant, almost unplayable. As such, the camera is constantly flipping around. NHL '94's top-down style is far superior in this regard; indeed, even with all the camera angles available on present-day systems, the rooftop view is simply how video game hockey has to be played.

But NHL Stanley Cup is not entirely forgettable. It bears repeating that the goalies are just too good, both defensively and on offense. Indeed, it is distressingly easy to score a goal as the goalie, and not just with the other team's net empty (as per the real-life Ron Hextall, the goalie who scored two empty-net goals). Rather, when your goalie has the puck, you can skate him out of the crease for an inordinate amount of time and space before drawing a whistle. If you get to the red line and then dump the puck, you can score on the other team with some consistency. It's easier, then, to score as the goalie than with the average attacker. If only your correspondent had known about the goalies’ scoring touch while he was playing against the older boy. Perhaps this is the real thesis of NHL Stanley Cup—that one day the goalies will rise and come unshackled from their creases, taking back the ice from their free-skating oppressors. Perhaps this is the reason why the pseudo-Patrick Roy on the cover of NHL Stanley Cup is making the save rather than giving up the goal. Its status as a radical, pro-goalie manifesto, then, is the one reason (and one reason only) NHL Stanley Cup remains noteworthy.

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.

NHL 2K5

Hockey in the 1980s was better than it is now. You had a sport led by matchless, unequivocal superstars, most obviously Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, each of whom put up previously unheard-of numbers, the former eclipsing the 200-points mark four times, and the latter falling just a point short in 1988-89. Gretzky and Lemieux took full advantage of play that was more wide-open and freewheeling than today's restrictive defensive style would ever allow. Teams were content to win 7-5 rather than 2-1, and even unknowns like Blaine Stoughton and Al Secord and Rick Kehoe had 50-goal seasons. Hell, Dennis Maruk, whoever that is, netted 60 in 1981-82. In short, the goal-mouths were well-fed. As a consequence, the eighties were the Dark Age of Goaltending, as goalies still wore reasonable amounts of padding along with sight-hindering yet aesthetically haunting plastic-molded masks (think Friday the 13th). The NHL still carried teams based in exotic locales like Hartford and Quebec City, and they all seemed to have endearing, unrivalled logos (the whale-fin W and the igloo-ish thing shaped like a lower-case “n”, respectively). And if you're Canadian, then all throughout the eighties you saw teams from your country in the Cup Finals virtually every year. In fact, a Canadian team won the cup six times in the decade; at present, it looks as if a Canadian team may never win the Stanley Cup again. In the nineties, Sunbelt markets and American capital took over the national sport of the great white north, and as a cold symbolic reminder, advertising now clutters the boards in every arena—boards which were, in the eighties, snow white save for the puck-marks etched thereupon.

Sega's ESPN NHL 2K5 allows you to relive this most glorious decade in hockey history, among others. Unlike its contemporaneous competitor, EA's NHL series, 2K5 includes “classic” teams—namely Stanley Cup champions from select years and other notable teams such as the finalists they defeated. Now you can play as the irrepressible 92 Penguins, the dynastic 82 Islanders, and the unstoppable 84 Oilers, possibly the greatest team of all time. Most of these teams are unlockable by way of points earned through in-game achievements, but some are available right out of the box. Other than the players who were still active at the game’s release, like the indomitable Mark Messier, most players on these classic teams have numbers and positions filling in for their names. However, NHL 2K5 contains a robust player-editor wherein you can rename players. Virtually any name that has ever appeared on the back of an NHL jersey is recognized by the game's audio, so you can hear many a legendary appellation announced after a goal-scoring play. In a dazzling deke around licensing legalities, these names include “Gretzky”, so you can even have the Great One leading your 84 Oilers back to the Stanley Cup. The player model doesn't really resemble Gretz, but the dominant playing style certainly does, and you're almost guaranteed at least a two-point performance every time he suits up. Adjust his hair to mullet-length (an option the player editor affords you) and he passes. Mullets aren't the only mark of authenticity. For added retro effect, there's even a “historical” rink which features boards sans advertising and the old pre-Meggnet 3-shaped nets that prevailed in the NHL before 1985. Think of NHL 2K5 as NHL 84.

Even though 2K5 is over a decade old, it is still highly playable, holding up against even NHL 18's overelaborate analog stickhandling system. 2K5 relies on what is essentially a two-button system—”pass” and “shoot”—and in this way allows for a much simpler, more gratifying experience, attaining to the action-based feel of NHL 94, the standard by which hockey video games are judged. Ironically, 2K5 does NHL 94 better than EA ever did in its many attempts to put “retro” modes in recent NHL games. Between the classic style and the classic teams, NHL 2K5 is like a time machine, taking you back to better days when hockey and hockey video games were actually entertaining. And as a bonus, you can even have the 1970s experience, playing with the helmetless heroes of the Boston Bruins and the notorious Philadelphia Flyers, better known as the Broad Street Bullies on account of their unfettered pugnacity.

Unfortunately, the roller derby-esque (if not Rollerball-esque) atmosphere of seventies hockey does not shine through quite as brightly in 2K5, owing to the game's lackluster fighting engine. While fights happen in abundance (almost as many as in the original NHL Hockey), it gets tiresome watching two players square off to throw non-impactful, meekly-animated jabs at one another. Fights in 2K5 lack all the stick-and-move (-and-don't-slip) strategies of hockey fighting, which are much better-captured by its overdog competitor, NHL 2005. This is really the only thing NHL 2005 does better than 2K5. To most people's tastes, NHL 2005 probably has the advantage in graphics, too, as the 2K5 player models tend to look like generic Neanderthals. This peccadillo, however, also works with the old-time hockey aesthetic—indeed, weren't hockey players of the past more than a bit troglodytic? Apart from that, announcer Gary Thorne's used-car salesman voice may wear a bit thin in terms of commentary, but you can always turn him off. Do that and you're left with a near-perfect, timeless hockey classic.

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.

NHL 2001

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.

NHL Hockey

The 1977 film Slap Shot is, without the hyperbole often mistaken for wit by millennial writers, a period piece of extraordinary genius. Over the course of the late sixties and seventies, with the NHL's expansion from six to twenty-one teams alongside the formation of the rival World Hockey Association, the employment opportunities for minor league hockey players substantially burgeoned. The corollary, however, was that the talent level of "major league" hockey dropped considerably. Skill and finesse were no longer the definitive capacities of an effective hockey player. By the mid-seventies players could participate in the bigs by virtue of sheer physical presence alone. The Philadelphia Flyers are a case in point. Their lineup consisted almost entirely of goons, and they became the first of the expansion teams to win the Stanley Cup, doing so largely on the grounds of intimidation, which earned them their "Broad Street Bullies" nickname with good cause. Faced with so many new and unusual hockey markets, the increase in fighting, stick-swinging and bench-clearing brawls served another crucial purpose: it kept people from places like Birmingham, Alabama and Oakland, California coming to the rinks, even if rudimentary skills like skating and passing were lacking. Slap Shot, then, impeccably captured hockey of its time—a brutally violent roller-derby on ice, its characters as fit for a professional wrestling ring as they were for a rink.

Few if any video games have accurately simulated hockey’s Crimson Age, and perhaps never will (though the 2K series has come close). That said, if you'd like to partake in something comparable to the perfect entertainment that is Slap Shot, then the original NHL Hockey by Electronic Arts is your ticket. To be certain, NHL Hockey’s sequel NHL 94 is the best game in the decades-old series due to its breezy gameplay and full license, but it lacks one crucial element that its predecessor has in spades: full-bore fistic fracases. While NHL 94 took the moral high ground and eliminated fighting entirely (by diktat of the NHL itself), the primordial game in the series was not nearly as virtuous, placing no limit upon fisticuffs. Occasionally, these fights break out during the course of gameplay, but the real goonery happens after the whistle. Body-check a few members of the opposition when play is stopped, and eventually one of them will drop the gloves. In due time, the penalty boxes will look like player's benches. NHL Hockey is, unfortunately, not up to the standard of NHL 94 in terms of pace, nor does it contain the all-important one-time shot, but again, like a hockey fan in Birmingham, Alabama, you're not at the rink for the ice capades. You're there to go to war.

Though the endless stream of fights may temporarily stave our bloodlust, NHL Hockey still leaves us wanting more. With all these post-whistle cheap shots, why aren't other players skating in to save their fallen line-mates? Why aren't the designated fighters spilling off the bench? What your correspondent really wants to know is: where are line-brawls? Where are the bench-clearing brouhahas? The 16-bit NHL Hockey obviously lacked the technology to simulate such multi-man free-for-alls, and certainly the National Hockey League would never approve of such gratuitous violence—at least not involving more than two players. But nowadays, we have systems capable of putting 12 or even 40 players on the ice. Why can't an intrepid little developer make a game that is one part non-licensed 70's hockey simulation, another part real-time strategy? When brawls break out, the controlling player could then set match-ups between various forwards, defensemen and goalies, methodically taking out the other team's marquee players en route to gooning their way to victory. And it doesn't even have to be unlicensed: get the Slap Shot rights from Universal Pictures and let the Charlestown Chiefs and Syracuse Bulldogs settle things once and for all, without (spoiler alert!) having to rely on a male striptease as the deciding factor.