"The apex of licensed hockey games, and maybe the apex of licensed sports games period."

The NHL series started off like many sports series during the SNES/Genesis era: A lot of trashy games, then they slowly figured it out until a perfect mix of seriousness and fun was achieved. The latter stages of sports games on the Genesis is the best era for sports games ever, because the genre was just young enough to have a lot of fun things wrong with it, but just starting to figure out what it was doing. NHL 96 is perhaps the best example of this.

The early days of the NHLPA licensed hockey games were decent, but altogether a glitchy mess that could be broken much too easily and there wasn't quite enough to do. The best thing one could play was a playoff mode, but what we wanted was a full playable season. We wanted to pick our favorite team, follow some stats and play out the whole year ourselves. A limited playoff mode with strict seedings with who you could play against wasn't quite good enough. The playable season came along in NHL 95, but it was impossible to select one team. You had to follow the season day by day and check off the games you wanted to play. Too tedious.

But then NHL 96 came along and fixed all that, and under the obvious improvements is one of the most fun sports games ever. Yes a lot was wrong with it, but who cares? Some games are just damn fun to play, no matter what. The most important thing here is NHL 96 lets you choose one team and play through their season without going into some silly calendar. Each team has their own logo, and there's even a distinctive home ice advantage. The crowd goes nuts whenever you do anything, the road team gets tired a little faster after a jarring hit and the organ music is often unique from team to team.

A big issue here is how easy the game can be. You can turn off penalties, offsides calls, injuries, fighting and even line shifts in-season. Furthermore, you can essentially make whatever trade you want via a "force trade" feature and turn any team in the league into an all-star squad with no fear of salary caps. You can even change the difficulty around, which is altogether ridiculous. The best way to play a "correct" hockey game in this is probably 10 minute periods, line shifts and goalies on auto, all star difficulty, as well as offsides, penalties, fighting and injuries all turned on. This review was written under those pretenses, although the various other options are still fun to play around with.

The biggest flaw with this game is the goalies. No matter the difficulty, any team you use will lead the NHL in Goals Allowed Average and be way too good at defending the other team. If you go with manual difficulty, you'll get blown out every game because a good deal of the computer's shots are next to impossible to stop. There's no real in between on this, so for the sake of realism you're forced to use the former option. This goes both ways, too. The computer goalie is often insane to score on, and the problem is compounded given the bottom net is far easier to get goals in than the top one. You have to attack the top net two out of three periods as the home team; when you have an advantage playing on the road, there's a fundamental problem with the game you're playing and there's almost no way to fix it.

But beyond that, the game is just fun as all hell, especially on all star difficulty. Fast-paced action, insane hits where you can send a guy crashing into the boards, and every once in a long while you can shatter the glass behind the net with a high shot. This rare feature has been around for awhile, but it never ever ever gets old. If you want to pick a team but not play all their games, you can simulate some or all the games during the year. Stats get tracked in very rudimentary form, and the game follows the actual NHL alignment from 1996 and seeds the playoffs accordingly. You even see a noticeable difference in skill among star players and random assorted slugs.

Sometimes, that's all that really matters. There's a lot of noticeable things wrong with NHL 96, but the game's fun factor is so through the roof that most flaws are easily ignored. It came at the right time, too. It was right as the sports genre started figuring out how to make a good game, but came along before the genre started taking itself too seriously and going for hyper-realism. These old sports games are a blast, and are the cream of the crop compared to the stuff you see nowadays. NHL 96 highlights all that.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/10/10

Game Release: NHL 96 (US, 1995)