Controlįor those of you who've never played an ea Mega Drive game, the first thing you'll notice is how well designed the controls are and how quickly they become intuitive.īutton one can best be summarised as the 'subtle' button. You needn't even play all the games on the same computer: players can export the league database to a floppy disk, take the floppy home with them to play their games, then import and merge the results onto the central database using the extensive League Manager's facilities. There are extensive facilities with which to customise your teams and every one of the 24 teams can be human-controlled.
You can play your way through an entire season, or you can simply launch straight into the knockout-basis playoffs and pretend you've done all the hard work already. This means you have the likes of Brett Hull, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky to play with. ea now has the official licence from the National Hockey League, so the teams have the correct nicknames and logos, and the licence from the nhl Players' Association means the players in the teams are all correctly-named chaps too. Every current nhl team is available, along with two All-Star teams. Let's start with the options: As you'd expect, you can play one-off exhibition games to your heart's content. There's a tendency for anyone who's seen the Mega Drive games to take it all slightly for granted, until you remember the competition on the pc - that's when you realise what a good job ha has done.
That's something other software houses might like to take note of.Īssuming that I'm now only talking to people waiting for the 6:53 to Norwood Junction and my grasp on their attention is equally fleeting, I won't beat about the bush and drag out the verdict until the final sentence: this game is absolutely brilliant. NHL Hockey, in its pc form, is the equivalent of NHLPA Hockey 94, or whatever the next Mega Drive one is going to be called, incorporating all the features that the next version in the original format of the game will have. 'Aha,' you're probably thinking, assuming you haven't already dropped the mag in Smiths and are sprinting for the 6:48 to East Grinstead, 'but I bet this version of the game is two years behind the Mega Drive version, like all the other games that eventually get to the pc from other formats.' That's the best thing about it - you're getting the latest version before it's even available on the Mega Drive. (Except it hasn't left a big red weal on my chest.)
It seems like only yesterday that I was struggling through yet another version of the uninspiring Wayne Gretzky Hockey and bemoaning the lack of a version of one of ea's games on the pc, and now suddenly, like a slapshot from the red line, it's here. Then there's the classic ice hockey game, EA hockey, and its re-jigged follow-up, NHLPA Hockey, on the Mega Drive.
There's Sensible Soccer on the Amiga, Super Tennis on the Super nes and the various versions of John Madden Football on the Mega Drive. The number of arcade action sports games that are recognised as true greats are very few indeed.