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.

Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi

In the wake of 2017's The Last Jedi, there arose among devotees of the series a grassroots internet movement to ban the film from the Star Wars canon. Efforts of these noble neckbeards aside, the movie still does the Star Wars universe justice, furthering (and finishing) a few vital character arcs. Thus, The Last Jedi must be respected. There are, however, several Star Wars offerings that do not further any arc or furnish any sort of earnest entertainment, and as such do not deserve respect. If anything, they deserve to be stricken from any and all canons to which they may pertain. One is the notorious Life Day special, which can only be enjoyed by those in whom the force of irony is particularly strong. Another is Masters of Teräs Käsi for PlayStation, which can't be enjoyed by anyone of sound mind.

A pivotal element of this blog's journalistic philosophy is what your correspondent lovingly likes to think of as "turd-polishing"—that is, taking a game widely considered bad and then showing the reader perspectives from which it might in some sense be appreciated. That approach is not foolproof, though, largely on account of games like Masters of Teräs Käsi. Teräs Käsi is the worst Star Wars video game of all time, and it also ranks among the most terrible fighting games of its none-too-hallowed era.

The thought of a Star Wars fighting game sounds intriguing, no? In the mid- to late-90s, generic fighting games were a dime a dozen, and so you might assume that a game benefitting from a Star Wars license would, if nothing else, stand out. After all, most fighting games, no matter their era, are at least somewhat playable by virtue of their simple, Manichean objectives and manageably-sized environs. Apparently, the bona fide marketing mavens at LucasArts intuited as much, and so they shoehorned Star Wars into the tournament fighting milieu by inventing an ancient martial art known as “Teräs Käsi.” In playing the game, however, the distinguishing principles of Teräs Käsi are unclear, as the move-sets are so boilerplate that you can easily convince yourself you're playing any other uninspired fighting game of the era. In effect, the Star Wars license only makes Teräs Käsi’s fundamental lack of imagination that much more obvious.

Masters of Teräs Käsi’s graphics are not atrocious, but beyond the visuals, key canonical cues are unconvincingly executed. Star Wars games—and the movies, for that matter—succeed principally on how well they deliver the basal sensory aggregates of the series: that is, the sounds and images that have come to condition the average fan’s experience of the brand. The Last Jedi had these crucial perceptual adjuncts, as did the unequivocal stinker that was the Phantom Menace. After the usual horn-blaring clarion call-to-prayer and the familiar yellow text crawling up the screen, though, Masters of Teräs Käsi does little to reassure the player that they are participating in the larger Star Wars cosmos. Sure, we see an AT-AT in the background of one stage, but where are the squalls from its massive leg joints? And sure, Boba Fett's roguish Kiwi accent is sufficiently muffled by his helmet, but it's hard to persuade yourself you're playing as the galaxy's most bad-ass bounty hunter when you fire up his jetpack only to fly straight out of the ring and then lose via ring-out.

Beating Teräs Käsi is no simple feat, and it's hard to make much progress through the various stages even on the easiest setting. It's one of those games where you find yourself asking: is it really that challenging or is the control just that bad? But even in terms of difficulty there are inconsistencies. If you play as Chewbacca, for instance, whose rangy limbs afford him excellent reach, you can beat opponents by pretty much just spamming kicks. Even Darth Vader, light saber and all, eventually falls to the mighty front-kicks from Chewie's long, hirsute dancer's legs. Evidently, the lost art of Teräs Käsi is built on a foundation of cheap, repetitive kicking.

Only the most hardcore Star Wars packrats should consider picking up Masters of Teräs Käsi—we're talking people who meet the DSM-V's diagnostic criteria for hoarding. This unpolishable turd will surely match the overall decor of the cluttered, festering hovels in which such people dwell. If you absolutely must play a Star Wars fighting game, check out Star Gladiator for PS1. It's a Capcom 3D-fighter that rips off Star Wars so shamelessly it's almost artful, featuring an obvious Wookiee-styled space Sasquatch and even a Darth Vader lookalike as the final boss. And if using the real Darth Vader and Yoda to kick the midi-chlorians out of Soul Calibur characters is fighting enough for you, then fire up Soul Calibur 4. Now if only we could kick the midi-chlorians out of the actual Star Wars canon...

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.

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

Your correspondent wants to be upfront from the outset: he knows nothing about Dragon Ball Z, other than the fact it's patently Japanese and exceedingly popular with children, man-children, and other fans of bright colors and loud sounds. That said, a lack of any prior knowledge of the series or where the game Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 fits within its canon will not unfairly bias the appraisal that follows. Even when reviewing Budokai Tenkaichi 3 not as the spawn of a monumental marketing force but rather as a generic fighting game, it still emerges as a must-purchase for versus-fighter fans. Even if you know nothing about the series, the game's specs speak for themselves. Most notably, there 150 playable characters in the game, a record for a fighting game that has yet to be broken, and probably never will be. Seventy-two of these beautifully drawn characters are available right out of the package, ranging from jagged-haired anime brats to viridescent aliens to boldfaced MegaMan clones, their sheer variety enough to make even the Milestone Comics lineup look like it has diversity issues. On top of that epic roster add twenty-odd stages, all of which are lush, sprawling and ecologically diverse. You can fight in forests, in deserts, in outer space, and even underwater. In essence, the available permutations and combinations of scenarios are endless, making BT3 nothing short of candy for the imagination of the fighting-game fan. The gameplay isn't that bad either, as it consists of a little bit of hand-to-hand combat and a lot more throwing of various projectiles (could these be the eponymous dragon testes?) from near or far, more often the latter given the size of the confines. Heedless of gravity, you traverse the nooks and crannies of these massive environments from a dramatic, behind-the-back view, making the game feel like the magisterial Power Stone but in a tight third-person. Anyone who fancies themselves a fan of fighters should track down BT3 without hesitation and bask in its inexhaustible potentialities. But for god's sake, if you're aged thirty or above, don't start watching the show!

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam

In 1998, Sammy Sosa was all at once everywhere. A man of humble roots, Sosa emerged from penurious origins in his native Dominican Republic and arrived in the major leagues on the cusp of the 90s, initially gaining some measure of fame for this evolution from a svelte base-stealer into a perennial thirty-homerun hitter as a member of the Chicago Cubs. Then, with little if any foreshadowing, the summer of ‘99 saw him on pace to break Roger Maris's record of 61 homeruns in a season. He would eventually eclipse that mark with a staggering total of 66 dingers at season’s end, but he was beaten to the record by Mark McGwire, who hit his fateful 62nd on September 8 against Sosa's Cubs and would wind up with the new and otherworldly benchmark of 70. Whether second-best or not, Sosa’s Herculean homerun total transformed him into duly vaunted superstar and, more crucially, a bona fide commercial commodity. His adorable face-rending smile found its way into ads peddling Big Macs and Pepsi-Cola, among other precious consumables. His power-hitting prowess even landed his image on the cover (and his name in the title) of 3DO's also-ran PS1 offering Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001. But one game was apparently not enough for the man who had hit a full five more homeruns than Roger Maris, for he also took the starring role in High Heat’s companion release, Sammy Sosa Softball Slam.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, as its hyper-alliterative title might portend, is not a good game. Its foremost failing is its resemblance to the High Heat Baseball series. Those games were notorious for their atrocious graphics, which managed to be simultaneously jagged and blurry, blocky and faceless. Their only saving grace was their fairly realistic AI, which lent itself to progressively better simulations from year to year. With Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, however, all those appealing aspects of real baseball are gone. In their place are softball—that is, slo-pitch softball—sensibilities: viz. sandlot diamonds with chain-link backstops and chalked circles instead of pitching mounds, slab-thighed people in either jeans, shorts and sweatpants playing for teams representing greasy spoon diners, labor unions and accounting firms. The gamer has the choice of playing gendered or co-ed, but the latter, quite fittingly, is the default. Players have tags like "Big Lou" and "Burger Boy." Many of them are endomorphic in shape. In terms of gameplay, throwing errors abound. In view of these hapless facets and the overall blue-collar, working class aesthetic, the game is an accurate simulation of softball. However, inexplicable arcadey trappings like flame trails on homeruns inject jarring disjunctions of surrealism into an otherwise brutally realist game. Mr. Sosa's own team, “Sammy's Slammers”, is another disjuncture, in that its female members are, to a woman, pneumatically-bosomed. Even more bizarrely, the game features a character editor which includes the option of, at a press of the square button, turning any given player into Sammy Sosa. You can, if you so choose, make Sammy Sosa every player on every team. All told, these elements turn the game into a mockery of softball, which is sort of redundant, as softball was already doing a fine job of self-mockery.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam leaves us with more questions than answers. Why did Sammy Sosa lend his name and cherubic smile to this proletarian abomination? Certainly he’s not the first athlete to endorse an appalling videogame at the lure of cash. Still, the bigger conceptual question remains: why is Sammy Sosa playing in the slo-pitch league depicted in the game? We can only tender hypotheses. Perhaps Sosa’s fictional foray into softball speaks to some deep-seated urge for lower middle-classness that lurked within the man even during the height of his celebrity. Maybe it relates to some latent guilt that stemmed from his alleged steroid use: as he grew more and more superhuman in both home run hitting and in sheer sinewy physicality, he became increasingly desperate to re-connect with the unpretentious, grassroots folk from whose stock he originally emerged. So intense was this desire that it led Sosa to approve of—perhaps even encourage—the idea that he not just participate in a slo-pitch softball simulation, but actually permeate it with quasi-divine omnipresence in his ability to incarnate as every slo-pitch player on every slo-pitch team, pervading all games on every slo-pitch field. The desperation, then, manifests as a largescale narcissistic fantasy, its attendant grandiosity taking on nothing less than a theological scope.

Perhaps Sosa's paramount blessing was finishing as runner-up to Mark McGwire in the homerun race. Because he never held the homerun record, the fact he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs has not tarnished his reputation as markedly as it did for McGwire or, for that matter, Barry Bonds. Sosa’s second place finish ensured that an asterisk needn't ever be superscripted next to his total of 66 homeruns in 1998.* But with his eponymous Softball Slam, we see that Sammy Sosa flirted with—perhaps even lusted after—something much lower than second-best. That is, he wanted to be closer to the working man and woman, and the pale simulacrum of baseball that (like video games themselves) allows such people temporary reprieve from their deplorable workaday lives.

Less distressingly, Sammy Sosa’s Softball Slam may offer a more positive takeaway, especially when we consider its player editor feature. Maybe the message is that within every single average Joe and Jane who plays softball, there is an exact replica of Sammy Sosa in his prime—we just need the right cocktail of Human Growth Hormone to unleash it.

NOTES:

*That asterisk could, however, be applied to Sosa's 2003 statistics, as it was in that year that he was caught playing with a corked bat.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the rights to the image of Sosa and spouse included above. However, it is my vague understanding that civil law protects parodic materials. This image is, quite clearly, self-parody, either consciously or unconsciously, and on those grounds its usage in this article is, in my estimation, fair.

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.

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

In the spirit of the season, with the release of the now-annual Star Wars film upon us, it is high time we think about some of the superlative video games from the movie franchise that marks the greatest marketing force in the history of commercialism. Perhaps the most acerbically underrated of the Star Wars games is Shadows of the Empire for the N64, long dismissed by critics as mediocre or even one of the worst Star Wars games when it is actually one of the best.

Dash Rendar

Shadows of the Empire puts the gamer in the boots of Dash Rendar, a rugged, stubble-chinned Star Wars version of Roland of Gilead (of Dark Tower fame), something of an interplanetary Clint Eastwood. His mission is to rescue Princess Leia from Prince Xizor, the overlord of what is basically an alien mafia. Rendar's quest begins at the battle of Hoth, in which he takes control of a Snowspeeder and helps fell AT-ATs with his skillful deployment of tow cables. The opening level's overall umwelt is nothing short of marvelous, particularly in terms of sound: from the squalling joints of the pachyderm-esque AT-STs to the mechanized chittering of the imperial drones (which has always sounded to this reviewer like they're muttering "Marilyn seems demure" over and over), the audio is spot-on. This is Hoth; you are in The Empire Strikes Back. The game is by no means just a spacecraft simulator; rather, it is a bounteous grab-bag of game types. For the subsequent stages of the Hoth mission, Shadows of the Empire becomes a third-person shooter—though the player has the option to go first-person, which your correspondent finds far more eminently playable and immersive compared to its over-the-shoulder alternative. After that, Rendar gets behind his ship’s gun turret to take out some TIE Fighters, turning the game into a space shooter—and an absorbing one at that. Then the game becomes an outright platformer when Rendar traverses speeding railcars on Ord Mantell, a level that is the apotheosis of the George Lucas experience, all narrowing paths and hair's breadth escapes. Shadows of the Empire even has racing elements, as the unwieldy, breakneck swoop-bike pursuit on Mos Eisley is essentially a chase to the finish.

All of these vastly diverse gameplay components are handled very competently. Some are almost too competent, and in this way, Shadows of the Empire is a victim of its own outstanding features. So good is the Hoth level, in fact, that some have complained the rest of the game pales in comparison. This had repercussions, as later Star Wars games for Nintendo systems, namely the stellar Rogue Squadron series, focused exclusively on this spacecraft-simulator aspect. Ultimately, Shadows of the Empire leans fairly heavily on the third/first-person running and gunning, and this is, admittedly, not quite as captivating as what happens in the air over Hoth. This is precisely the criticism levied by Allgame's Scott Alan Marriott. In a quote this reviewer admits was lifted directly from Wikipedia, Marriott calls the on-foot levels “rather boring, probably due to the less involving third-person perspective.” In response to Mr. Marriot and anyone else with this particular critique, I would suggest they’re playing Shadows of the Empire the wrong way. Switch to first-person. It is real dread you’ll feel when you swing around to run from the angered Wampas’ ponderous pursuit.

This sort of immersion is the principal strength of Shadows of the Empire. The sound-effects, in concert with John Williams' score, make for a thoroughly cinematic feel, as do the graphics which, while somewhat blocky, still benefit from stirring shading effects and gritty, textured backdrops. When seen and heard in first-person, this all contributes to a far more convincing experience of the Star Wars umwelt than comparable games of the time, such as the PlayStation FPS offering Star Wars: Dark Forces, which feels more like the original Doom or Powerslave than it does a true Star Wars game. And that, your correspondent submits to you, dear reader, is what Star Wars is: a series of familiar sounds and images and feelings that are all at once compelling and comforting. Shadows of the Empire has all these crucial evocations, and not only lets you participate within them, but it lets you do so in so many different ways (shooting, flying, racing, and so forth). How, then, can we deny Shadows of the Empire is one of the best Star Wars video games? There are far too many kinds of quality within it to write it off.

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.

Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest

Do you want to see adult film legend Ron Jeremy play major league baseball? If your answer to this question is yes—and it should be—then picking up a copy of Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest is imperative. The second N64 offering in Nintendo’s cartoonish Griffey-backed baseball series contains audio clips of the names of virtually all MLBPA players from the late 90s, and announces them over the in-game public address system as they make their way out to the plate or the mound. The game also features a moderately robust create-a-player mode, and any creation with the first and/or last name of an active player will be likewise announced before batting or pitching. Thanks to Ron Gant and Jeremy Giambi,

the owner of Slugfest has the privilege of hearing porn’s most famous name ring out in any major league ballpark. Set your create-a-character’s weight at a Rubenesque 270, height at 5'8, give him a black Mario-worthy moustache and voila!—the Hardest (Working) Man in Show Business is now a major leaguer. Indeed, the irrepressible Hollywood D-Lister's Slugfest avatar bears Nintendo’s adorable spokes-plumber an odd resemblance, which has already been appreciated to great effect by the timeless adult-oriented feature Super Hornio Bros., starring Jeremy in the lead role of Hornio Hornio. What role will Ron Jeremy play on your team? His skills at third base are amply documented, at least figuratively speaking. Jeremy’s potential presence, however, is really the only enduring charm of Slugfest. True to the Griffey series’ abiding arcade sensibilities, Slugfest is built around cursor-based batting, the done-to-death darling of late-90’s baseball videogame developers. This system has not aged particularly well, as it basically reduces hitting to a mini-game. The options permit you to switch the batting style to “classic”, which relies on timing and general bat position in the style of earlier and later baseball classics such as Hardball and MVP 2004 but be prepared for low-scoring, pitching-dominated affairs where the few runs plated result from lucky-strike homeruns. Still, Slugfest’s peccadilloes are worth suffering to see Ron Jeremy go deep in Mets’ pinstripes. And for once, mercifully, he keeps his pants on while doing so.

Punch-Out!!

In any iteration, Punch-Out!! is pure prizefighting genius, a verdict that should come as no surprise to even the most casual gamer. Considering it was first released in 1987, the cinematic feel of its presentation is staggering. Drawing on Rocky-esque tropes—most notably the training cut-scene with a cityscape in the background, not Philadelphia but even better Manhattan, complete with the Statue of Liberty—Punch-Out!! evokes a fundamentally American aesthetic and narrative arc.

Apart from the presentation, Punch-Out!! remains noteworthy on account of its characters. While Little Mac, the Caucasian-American protagonist under the player's control, is underwhelming and diminutive, virtually faceless with his back to the player for most of the game, the antagonists he faces are the stuff of legend. What is most fascinating about the pixelated pugilists is that they are, from the perspective of the American consumer, almost entirely composed of foreigners, and each of these internationally-flavored opponents is depicted in an aggressively stereotypical fashion. There is, for example, a fairly obvious Orientalism informing the look and comportment of several characters, such as Piston Hondo, a Japanese fighter complete with logographic headband and easily agitated eyebrows above his epicanthic gaze. The Orientalism is even more egregious in the case of Great Tiger, a turbaned Sikh who is, quite impressively, capable of a fakir-like flickering in and out of visibility whilst floating about the ring. Curiously enough, the game was developed by an all-Japanese crew headed by Nintendo standout Genyo Takeda, suggesting that some of the East Asian stereotypes may have been self-deprecating in-jokes.

The feckless French stereotype (right)

But the caricatures go beyond Orientalism, for all cultures portrayed in Punch-Out!! are painted in gaudy, monochromatic tones. Don Flamenco is a Spanish romantic who dances pompously with a rose-stem between his teeth; far more flair than substance, he mounts minimal offense, making for an easy knock out. The Frenchman Glass Joe is even more hapless, victim of perhaps the archest stereotyping: gutless and ineffectual, he goes down easiest of any character. These stereotypes are not just aesthetical, but are literally coded right into the fabric of the gameplay. Punch-Out!!'s characters are as notorious among NES enthusiasts for their logic patterns as they are for their looks and personalities. Thus, it is unanimously known that corpulent Pacific Islander King Hippo will jab mercilessly before inevitably jumping in the air and unhinging his massive craw, opening himself up to a fistic assault which will cause him to drop his drawers and expose his vulnerable spheroid gut for further damage. Moreover, everyone knows that when the gem in the middle of Great Tiger's turban begins to sparkle, it’s due time to block his attacks. Punch-Out!! essentially reduces the cultural Other to a sort of automaton, limited to a narrow range of behaviors and gestures, and altogether incapable of change. By contrast, Little Mac has the ability to move left and right, and punch in any sequence the player deems fitting. The American subject(ivity), then, fully realized in the player/consumer holding the controller, is possessed with expansive agency relative to the Other. To be American is to fully actualize this agency, and most markedly so through sport—if not the physical act itself, then the spectation thereof or the participation in spectation via video game simulation. In any event, the Other is to be conquered en route to glory.

Punch-Out!! proffers further sociopolitical commentary vis-à-vis the most obvious Other of its era. Given that the Berlin wall was edging towards a fall and the Cold War was approaching absolute zero during the development of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (the game’s original North American home release in 1987), a character like Soda Popinski can be read in terms of the contemporaneous geopolitics. The pinkish hue of his skin signifies quite plainly his socialist background—that is, the "pinko commie". Moreover, Popinski minces his well-muscled frame around the ring in a skimpy Speedo, definitely not standard boxing attire, indexing a certain degree of effeminacy for the political Other. Correspondingly, he is given to dancing mid-match. More damningly, Popinski is characterized by an obvious fixation for quaffing the soda pop for which he is named, an act of obsessive consumption that would seem to forsake his inborn Marxist orientation. Thus, the hypocrisy of Popinski's collectivist, Communist values and the individual restraint they would ideally embody is conveyed via his irrepressible pattern of consumption centering upon a beverage commercially popularized in America. This makes for a more rigorous (and less juvenile) critique of Russo-Soviet culture than the character's original conceptualization earlier on in the game’s development—that is, "Vodka Drunkenski", a moniker that was eventually modified when it was adjudged potentially offensive, for whatever reason.

Punch-Out!!'s American adversaries do not appear until the end of the game, and they provide the toughest competition. They also have the least personality, amounting to little more than generic strong men who are hyper-competent in the sweet science. The message seems to be clear: the world is the rest, but America is the best; we're not dancing around anymore. Evidently, the Japanese programmers were enamored of America. Oddly enough, the incumbent champ Super Macho Man fights in the same pattern as Popinski, perhaps conjecturing the dialectal ideological mirror that Americans and Soviets, Capitalists and Communists, provided for one another. This may be a subtle critique from the Japanese developers, though it is more likely lazy programming. The final boss in 1990's Punch-Out!! is another American, Mr. Dream by name, and he has the least character of all, square-headed and box-cut with an inexorable winning smile. This is America, an exceptional force cutting through the layers of dross that constitute all the other ethnicities of the world and their cultural overlays, and giving you, in the end, pure sinew with a grin.

As its title indicates, the original home version of Punch-Out!! featured Mike Tyson until Nintendo's license to use the likeness of the Baddest Man on the Planet expired. Mr. Dream, then, was a re-skinning of Tyson for the 1990 re-release of the game. This proved to be a fortuitous move, as family-friendly Nintendo certainly wouldn't want anything to do with the embattled Iron Mike who would soon after be convicted of rape charges. Mr. Dream, then, can be interpreted as a white-bread gentrification or domestication of Mike Tyson; that is, a more palatable—and entirely fictional—realization of the American dream. Perhaps behind the unfaltering smile, though, there still lurks the predatory animal heart of America, moving in Mike Tyson’s predetermined pattern.

In sum, Punch-Out!! is nothing short of timeless, in much the same way Orientalists presumed the colonial Other to be, what with their inherent ahistorical torpor. This sense of civilizational stagnancy is readily visible in the game’s non-American characters, who collectively evidence a particular lack of imagination—or rather a commitment to a particular constellation of troublesome cross-cultural imaginings—on the part of the programmers. While Punch-Out!! is undeniably problematic politically speaking, its gameplay holds up even today, and for that reason, among others, the odious stereotypes it perpetuates will live on in the annals of Boxiana and beyond.