NHL Hockey

NHL Hockey was Electronic Arts' first hockey game and the first release to carry the EA Sports logo. Park Place Productions built it for the Sega Mega Drive in 1991, and since the same team had just finished John Madden Football, the approach is familiar: an arcade pace laid over a properly simulated sport. In Europe the game shipped as EA Hockey.

The licensing deal shows immediately. EA had the NHL licence but not the players' association one, so the clubs, jerseys and divisions match the 1990/91 season while the skaters have no names at all, only numbers on their backs. The developers did give them attributes modelled on their real counterparts, so number 99 in Los Angeles colours genuinely skates and shoots differently from his linemates. If you know who you are looking for, you can read a roster off the sweater numbers; if you do not, you are icing five anonymous men.

The rink is seen from above, and the game hands you far more of the rulebook than a 1991 console title needs to. Face-offs, power plays, line changes and fights are all in, and individual infractions can be switched on and off one by one, from tripping through hooking to cross-checking, so you decide whether you want hockey or a brawl. The goaltenders are computer controlled while you take the skaters, and an instant replay covers the last ten seconds.

Control is coarse, which is exactly why it takes a minute to learn: holding the puck is easy, passes fly along fixed axes and the shot has only a couple of settings. The computer opponent is not much of a test and the goalies leak cheap goals from outside the circles, so within a few games you know where to shoot from. With a second player on the pad, though, it is still excellent, short and fast and full of heavy hits.

Today it is mostly a very playable ancestor, smoother and easier to read than most sports games of its era, even if the sequels did all of it better two years later. On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser with nothing to install.