WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - ESPN National Hockey Night

Publisher: Sony Imagesoft Developer: Park Place Productions Release: 1994

Here we have the second of four ESPN-licensed sports games from Sony for the Sega CD. In the last instalment of this series I covered the baseball game, which was downright atrocious. National Hockey Night isn't quite as bad as all that, but when you consider the only real competition on the system was EA's own NHL 94 – considered one of the best hockey games of all time – National Hockey Night was doomed if it was anything less than perfect.

And that it was.

While National Hockey Night isn't completely broken, it doesn't really play very well, either. Players have a strange sort of momentum that makes them really difficult to control. It's not uncommon to check an opponent off the puck, only to have him get back up and regain possession while you struggle to move your player into position.

Passing is a pain in the ass, too. Unlike EA's NHL games, where aiming in the general direction of one of your players usually resulted in a successful hand-off, directional control in National Hockey Night is so touchy that it feels next to impossible to complete a pass on purpose. Aiming a shot is also next to impossible, it seems. The puck seems pretty much attracted to the goalie, and doesn't feel like it reacts at all to your direction.

It's safe to say that NHL 94 is a better game than National Hockey Night in almost every way. And the shocking bit is, of course, that Park Place Productions developed both titles! I guess there's a lot to be said for publisher involvement.

National Hockey Night does have a couple of interesting things going for it, though.

Up until EA's NHL series, most hockey games were played from a side view (like the coverage you see on television). This view is more or less horrible, as the goalie sprite tends to take up a huge chunk of real-estate in front of the net, making it hard to judge exactly how much room you have between the pipes when you take a shot.

Even after EA's NHL Hockey came out, it was still pretty common to see this view (Sega's own Mario Lemieux Hockey and NHL All-Star Hockey come to mind). National Hockey Night, though, actually includes both views – the more TV-like side camera and the extremely more playable vertical camera.

National Hockey Night also features some of that great multimedia shoehorning that was so common back in the early 90s. But rather than doing full-motion video highlight reels or commentary (though National Hockey Night does feature a bit of the latter), this game does something else entirely – randomly during play the game will cut to full-motion video clips of hits, shots, and saves based on what's happening out on the ice.

Few problems, here: First of all, each of these clips needs to load, and then the game proper needs to load up again once the clip has stopped playing. So all this really does is disrupt the flow of the game. That wouldn't be so bad, though, if the clips featured the same teams that were actually on the ice (let alone the same players or situations). For example: as my Penguins goalie lays a Nordique forward flat in the actual game, I'm treated to a scene where two Flyers are flattening one of the LA Kings.

I understand the logistical issues behind showing the right teams at all times, but shouldn't the very nature of the problem have been a huge red flag on this feature in the first place?

Anyway, that's ESPN National Hockey Night. Two ESPN games down, two to go.