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Ice Hockey
PUBLISHER: Nintendo
DEVELOPER: Pax Softonica
RELEASE DATE: Mar. 1988 (US), Apr. 15th, 1988 (EU)
I’m not very good at Ice Hockey. Sure, I can make a goal here and there, but I never feel like I fully know what I’m doing. Switching between players doesn’t always work for me. In fact, I often struggle to keep track of my players, despite putting the game speed on the lowest setting. I rarely get the puck during a face-off. I’m decent at defending my goal, but if the computer team – particularly those crazy Soviets – work together to bomb my goalie, I almost always crumple.
Despite my subpar performance, I can tell that Ice Hockey is a solid arcade-y 8-bit representation of the sport. The game controls well where it counts, even if the action is too fast (is this the aging process? Say it ain’t so…). You have enough options to give you a sense of control, but not so many that you’re overwhelmed. And, of course, the fighting. You can scuffle with players from the other team if you want. If the fight goes on too long, your whole team gets involved and penalties ensue. Sensational!
Pick your team from the country of your choice. Provided, of course, your choice is the U.S., Poland, Sweden, Canada, U.S.S.R., or Czechoslovakia. What’s that, the U.S.S.R. and Czechoslovakia no longer exist? Be that as it may, they were still viable options in 1988. The past is a strange and beautiful thing.
So you’ve picked USA, aka Team Freedom. A most excellent choice. After you select your speed setting (1 is the lowest, 5 is the highest) and game length (7, 10, or 15 minutes per period), you choose which four ragamuffins will be on your hockey team. This is 1988, so there are no NHL licensed teams or players here, only… body types.
Will your team feature three heavy dudes and a skinny dude? Will you opt for the “sampler” approach, two mediums, a heavy, and a skinny? The possibilities are not endless, but they are surprisingly vast. Body type determines how each player controls. Heavy is slow but also unlikely to be knocked down and has a helluva strong shot. Mediums are slightly faster than heavies, can be knocked down occasionally, but are otherwise well-rounded players. Skinnies are fast as lightning, but a light breeze will knock them down and their shots are generally weaker.
At long last, you’re on the rink and the face-off is nigh. As mentioned previously, I couldn’t grab the puck here if my hockey players’ lives depended on it (thankfully they didn’t). The face-off doesn’t matter much, though. Intercepting the puck is often a simple matter of slamming your slightly larger player into others. Or of stopping a goal and throwing the puck back to your team.
Once you’ve obtained the puck, hit it into the opposing side’s goal and feel like a king for five seconds. Then it’s back to the game, back to blood on the rink.
Playing against the computer is fine for awhile, but Ice Hockey’s longevity absolutely comes from its two-player chaos and carnage. I can imagine friends and siblings particularly reveling in the in-game fighting, if only because, well, it’s hockey. Like wrestling, it stirs up the blood, encourages people to engage in animalistic behavior for some vague sense of glory and victory.
For this post, the U.S. was my team, and I chose the U.S.S.R. as my opponents. Trying to recreate the 80s Cold War vibes as much as possible, ya dig?
Big mistake. The U.S.S.R. is a profoundly excellent hockey team (in Ice Hockey anyway), which, in retrospect, makes sense. It’s very cold in Russia and I imagine the Soviet Union really “encouraged” their hockey teams to practice for hours and hours at a time.
Canada, however, was not a formidable opponent against the U.S., which makes zero sense. Statistics show that every fifth child born in Canada is a future pro hockey player.1 At least in the clearly unrealistic world of Ice Hockey, Canada are lower-tier, small potatoes compared to their southern cousins.
You can adjust the speed, the game length, and your players’ body types, but once you’ve explored the game’s permutations, Ice Hockey doesn’t have much to offer besides a cracking two-player mode. That’s ok, because – I’ll say it again – this game was released in early 1988. What more would you want, other than some decent hockey playing, and the ability to fight your sibling in-game with zero consequence.
ALSO AVAILABLE ON: You could import the Famicom Disk version of Ice Hockey, if you cherish flimsy physical media, or you could play the game right now – multiplayer even – on Nintendo Switch Online.
this is a joke, please do not ever cite this as fact
I’ve always liked this one. I didn’t get to experience the sibling rivalry, but my ~4 years older neighbor owned this game and would always destroy me.
Ice Hockey clearly exhibits a higher level of refinement than Nintendo’s first set of NES sports games, even if it can’t match Baseball’s place in my heart. I think everything about this was the right way to do hockey on 8 bits.
The different body types gave the gameplay a surprising amount of variety. A team of skinnies plays very different from a team of heavies. I like to play the USSR with a full team of heavies and pretend they're drug-enhanced supermen like Ivan Drago.