Ice Hockey

" First rate pond hockey."

I've found that hockey games in general are inherently well-suited for gaming. What's not to love about them? There's fast-paced action, plenty of scuffling, fascinating team rivalries, and most importantly, and to top it off, one of the most enthusiastic fan-base I've ever seen. Ice Hockey doesn't contain any of that, and the list goes on. There are no NHL teams, rules, fans, referees, tie-breakers; fighting, and eight of the players have vanished without explanation. However, the enjoyable simplicity of keeping only four people on the small rink is a breath of fresh air, more than making up for any lost credentials.

For the Atari 2600, Ice Hockey is your only option within the sport unless you consider a variation of Pong (Hockey Pong, included in Video Olympics) to be an accurate representation of the sport.Ice Hockey is conceptually a lot like Pong, for a variety of basic reasons, but primarily for the way the siding comes into play. The biggest difference: in IH, there are four Canadians wielding blade-ended Pong paddles and HP features an annoying light-blue background and is a rather poorly presented game, all around.

The most effective way to rack up points is actually rebounding from the walls and into the goal, permitting that you hit the puck at just the right angle. "Mucking it up" around the goal and using the forward to set up a one-timer for himself, via ricochet, is a good deal of fun. Said use of walls makes the defenseman your probable shooter, with your forward cherry-picking around either the middle of his zone or the sides of the goal for rebounds. This doesn't necessarily work on regular speed, where your opponent can often catch up to the puck before it meets the rectangular goal.

The rink is essentially a sheet of white representing ice and two (black) symmetrical rectangles on the top and bottom of the rink, protruding a measure inwards, for the nets. Once dropped in a face-off, the vulcanized rubber piece apparently comes to life. Even when there isn't any evidence that the player is in motion, the puck quivers in a way, moving from the left end of the stick's blade, to the right. This looks pretty bad, but actually looks as though they're maneuvering the puck, when the player's in motion. What the puck is doing here is actually determines one of 32 angles from which the puck can be shot. Interesting, yet annoying and flawed. The color pallet for the players uniforms, helmets, pants, and skates are limited to three colors. Sound effects include an emulated organ introduction and in literal terms, all the bells and whistles you might expect in a hockey game. When your player gets knocked down, he emits a scruffy grunt upon hitting the ice.

If you're looking for a perfect hockey title from the past, then you're not going to do much better than Ice Hockey... for the NES. But Activision's Atari 2600 Ice Hockey is an engaging play-through which leaves little to be desired. The development team's primary goal seems to have been to put you into the game as no other sports game has, and in that respect, it is a must buy for any collector. Even people who have no concept of how hockey is played will be able to compete with the most hardcore of gamers.

8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/15/07