ESPN National Hockey Night

"About as fun as a kick in the nutz from your grandmother..."

I'm not going to write a HUGE review about this game, since it only lasted about 2 hours before I brought it back to EB for a refund. I do have a lot of hockey videogame experience though, so I have a pretty good idea which games are good (EA NHL 96 for Genesis and Fox NHL Championship 2000 for PS1) and which games are manure (Mario Lemieux hockey for the Genesis). So, I'll tell you what I noticed while I played this game for those two hours:

Graphics - 3

The player graphics are so-so, no facial hair on anyone, and the jerseys look kinda distorted. Some animations are too fast, some are too slow, and sometimes (if you're not holding down the ''turbo'' button) your players don't skate at all. They just coast around, hunched over like they got a punch to their gut. There's a lot of choppiness in the animations and also a tad bit of slow down on many occasions. Players which get checked into the boards seem to go half-way through the boards a lot. The overall look and detail of the graphics is nowhere near the same level of EA's NHL 2001. At least they kinda got the stadiums right. The architecture is right on, but the detail isn't that great. The fans don't look as good as the fans in some other games. Is this a PS2 game???

Sound - 4

Not much to say here. The ESPN songs and sounds are kinda cool, but the play-by-play announcing got repetitive after only one game. In game sounds were okay, but nothing spectacular.

Gameplay - 1

Here's where this games bites the dust. They had so much time to work on this game and tweak it. I can't believe designers, QA managers, and game testers actually approved of this mess. Right off the bat, you know the game's got problems when they assign a finger/shoulder button (on the PS2 controller) to change your guy! Also, the ''check'' function is mapped to the same button as ''shoot''. So, you'll be trying to check a guy, then at the same time steal the puck and WHOOPS, there goes your shot all the way down the rink for an icing call. Which leads me to the other GLARING problem with this game: There isn't an obvious way of knowing if you have control of the puck. The puck has a little red arrow over it, but that's it. If your player has the puck, his icon doesn't change at all. Jeez. Auto line changes DON'T HAPPEN!!! Um, I played a FULL game, with auto line changes, and the same 5 guys never left the ice (except for penalties!) Oh yeah, penalties... every other penalty in this game is a hooking call. No joke. You can fully crush a guy on the boards, and get called for a penalty. But the lil ref skates by, and calls you for hooking! Weird! Also, in 2 1/2 games, with both teams checking like mad and racking up massive amounts of penalites, there wasn't a single fight. BOO!!!

Replayability - N/A

I dunno, since I already returned my copy of the game.

Other stuff - 1

Rosters are not up to date. This game was released on March 27th and still there are obvious roster screwups. I played with the Devils and they still had Claude Lemieux...better yet, they had him playing defense! Duh. Mario Lemieux is in the game, but the announcer calls him Hans Johnson or something. In the few games I played against my friend, we totaled about 150 shots per game. Camera angles suck, hard. Only one or two of them are playable. The game starts you off with the side-angle camera. Uh, hello, the last hockey video game with a side angle camera which played well was NES' Blades of Steel. This game is more like the pathetic Mario Lemieux hockey for the Genesis. In between whistles, there isn't much action (like in EA NHL 2001). Players don't interact with each other, no shoving, or anything. The whistle blows and everyone stops what they're doing and skates away back to the faceoff circle! Ooh, very realistic! No extras included except ''Create-a-Player'' (which is a sports game standard nowadays), no extra teams other than All Star teams, no cool old-style uniforms, no authentic goalie helmets/pads, just a whole lotta boring crud.

Don't pickup this game. It's right on the border of horrible and below average, so it's not even worth the rental just to make fun of it. To sum up this game in one word: Poop.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/29/01, Updated 03/29/01