this is.... not really the kind of game i'd usually cover at all, i think the only sports game i'd covered up until now was everybodys golf and i've barely even touched the genre at all, but to cover at least one game per EP episode i kind of had to eventually because this episode was nothing *but* hockey games and this was the most interesting of the lot, still, i'm canadian so this was bound to be something i should have tried eventually, though i don't live in canada anymore i did spend a large chunk of my life there and i still very much consider myself to be canadian (i still have my citizenship even!). so, how was my first hockey game, a staple of my homeland.... it was okay, i guess.

before i even played it i made sure to prepare right, i went out and got myself a tim hortons lunch and a french vanilla (my goto is whatever veggie burger they have on offer and a large FV with extra sugar) and came home to binge the game. i tried a few modes here but sadly the game was very barebones as you may expect from a sports game of its age. it's basically just exhibition, multiplayer, a basic career mode with some basic stats and the ability to autoplay matches and a playoff mode, plus training which is more or less just exhibition. the game is also despite the apparent involving of tommy tallarico in the game, almost entirely silent, it has all the sounds you'd expect and some mild commentary between rounds but no music or realtime commentary, it's almost a little eerie. there wasn't much for me to do overall so i just played a few exhibition matches and a chunk of the season mode. learning the controls felt a little hard to do because the AI was really fast and good at it, there weren't any difficulty options that i could find but i did have an okay enough time once i caught on, despite not having analog control it does work well enough and you can adjust the game speed in the options to be slower if you need to, it plays about how you'd expect really, with passes and character switching and shots to the goalie, which i had set to do automatically. i wasn't good at it but i did win a few matches, by a few i mean two out of the 15 or so i played, but still!

there isn't a lot else to say, it's a forgettable hockey game, disposable almost, sure it's pretty for its time and it has some really realistic animations and i think this kind of "old attempt at realism that has maybe aged poorly" is a cool art style in itself so it has some aesthetic value for sure but it's all so basic and nothing for me, would i reccomend it? i mean, do you like old hockey games? if so then yes, if not, then i mean, i don't really know, this is just like a filler episode but for whatever this is i do, go play bujingai or something instead, i added that to my topstars last week, i should upload that here somewhere, or play caligula effect 2 also, that game has a great OST and it owns, fantastic game.

this ep of EP was.... well it was all just hockey games, i don't have a lot to say, some weeks its all hits and sometimes its all hockey, we did get a wide sweep of them though at least with some from sony or EA or smaller scale affairs here, something you absolutely do not see anymore, as with the baseball games we talked about in the last EP article but otherwise it's all pretty unremarkable beyond the fact it has one of the first times tommy ever complemented a game he directly worked on and gave it a super high score, expect to see a lot of that coming foreward in both the next episode and later on with games like maximo and advent rising. next week gets much more interesting with the appearance of tetrisphere, which is what i'll cover... when i get to it.