I WANT MY MONEY BACK!

I decided to write a little non-paid freelance article for Jeremy Parish's 1up feature I WANT MY MONEY BACK! I don't know if it will get posted so I thought I would put it up here just in case.

The Offender: NHL Stanley Cup (Nintendo, 1993 | SNES)

The Moment of Truth: The Mode-7 Headache

Way back in 1992, Nintendo brought out Hal's NCAA basketball for the SNES. This was the first non-arcade sports game to go 3d. NCAA used the mode-7 scaling and rotation capabilities of the SNES to follow the player with the ball in 3d, bringing you down onto the court for a more personal game. It was a good game for its time, and arguably the best sports games ever to grace the system. Fast forward to about a year later, and Nintendo would release what looked to be a 3d hockey version by Sculptured Software entitled NHL Stanley Cup.

As a fan of NCAA Basketball and a Nintendo fanboy (who has since branched out), I was pretty excited for a Hockey version. When Stanley Cup finally came out, I ran down the street to the mall near my house to pick up my reserved copy from EB.

During the walk home I stared at the screens on the back of the box, marveling at how much the graphics had evolved since NCAA just a year earlier. When I got home I immediately popped it into the SNES and flipped the purple power button. Good music greeted me and I was sure a great game would follow, but when I made it through all of the option screens and onto the ice, I found a title where the technology wasn't quite ready for the sport. The faster-paced hockey gameplay was so fast paced that it made the slow frame rate unbearably obvious, and the graphics were far more pixilated than the back of the box made them out to be. Mode-7 had not been kind to the ice. I played through two periods and took the game back to the store for a full refund less than a half an hour later.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that I hadn't given up on hockey video games. When I dropped my fanboy ways and picked up a Genesis (thanks to a little title called Gunstar Heroes), I would also pick up EA's NHL Hockey 1994 and find out how much fun a hockey game really could be.

-Wes