NHL 2K

• Release Date: February 09, 2000
• Genre: Sports
• Style: Hockey
• Similar Games: NFL 2K (Dreamcast), NBA 2K (Dreamcast), NHL 2000 (PlayStation)

Game Description

NHL 2K is the inaugural hockey game for the Sega Dreamcast from the folks at Black Box and Sega Sports. It delivers all the players and teams (28) representing the six divisions and two conferences from the 1999-2000 NHL season. The game is complete with authentic jerseys, equipment, 29 3D arenas and over 800 unique player faces.

The players are composed of 1500 polygons each and there are over 700 different motion-captured moves (including over 100 for goalies alone) to convey the action to gamers. Also included are little touches such as sprays of ice every time a skater comes to a stop and animated fans and coaches when the action moves to the sideboards. Users can customize plays and players as well. Professional commentators Bob Cole and Harry Neal, both formerly of the television show Hockey Night in Canada, top everything off with over 12,000 play-by-play and color commentary.

Hockey fans can take over as the coach of their favorite team and devise playcalling strategies and engage in exhibition matches before embarking on a season or playoff tournament. They can even use the eight different types of skates, nine glove types, four stick styles, four variations on helmets (with customized goalie masks, of course), and team-specific pucks and alternate jerseys to create their own players. Everything they customize can be saved to a Visual Memory Unit.

Black Box also made the decision to include fighting in this title. Two players who go at it are zoomed in on and each player is then given their own energy meter. Whoever's energy runs out first loses the fight, and, of course, both of them go to their penalty boxes to sit out for a while once they're done.

So what are you waiting for? Head out on the ice for some action in NHL 2K.

Roots & Influences

This game is based on the sport of hockey as played in North America in the NHL. Its obvious influences include Electronic Arts' long-running series of NHL games, which was very popular on the Sega Genesis and Nintendo SNES systems before migrating to the PC and Sony PlayStation.

Review: Overall

I really wanted to love NHL 2K when I placed that cool black GD-ROM in my Sega Dreamcast, especially after seeing all of the great screenshots that were available online. I wanted to love it even more when I started up an exhibition game and witnessed graphics and animation that were, dare I say, better than what NFL 2K offered up a few months earlier.

What a shame, then, when I played through a few exhibition games and realized that Black Box seemed to put more thought and time into the meat of an incredible visual feast than they put into creating a solid skeleton composed of a good CPU AI.

With that out of the way, let's look at the positives in this game first. In a nutshell, it looks and feels like an animated movie. The players move with amazing smoothness and grace, and all the little details that hard-core fans expect are here; I could see a hockey fan mistaking a demo of NHL 2K for a real telecast if they saw it from afar in a store. Players shoot a spray of ice into the air every time they make a quick stop. They wipe their faces with their gloves and tap their sticks on the ice as they prepare for a face-off. The coach paces back and forth behind the players on the bench. Fans in the crowd actually stand up and cheer when the action becomes intense.

That last item deserves some more commentary. Whereas the crowds in games like Madden NFL 2000 or NFL 2K are mostly 2D pictures or a mish-mash of pixels, the crowds in this game are simply amazing. The fans in the lower levels of every arena are unique entities that clap and cheer and get on their feet when the home team does well. I guarantee that any sports fan's jaw will drop when they see it.

My only gripe in the visual realism department is the lack of a great celebration when a team wins the Stanley Cup. I finished a championship season with the Dallas Stars and was rewarded with one guy holding the cup over his head and a few others raising their sticks in the air while goalie Eddie Belfour continued to stay in the net. Huh? How hard would it have been to come up with a great cut-scene featuring the players flooding the ice and hugging each other, the coach celebrating as photographers and cameramen mob him, and a lap or two with the Stanley Cup? I've never understood developers who strive to hit the little details in a sports game and then fail to deliver a stunning climax with a great championship celebration.

On the audio side, though, the game is merely average at best. There is little in the way of the sounds of the game such as grunts from the players or hearing them jaw with the referee when a penalty gets called against them (something which Electronic Arts' NHL 2000 does incredibly well, by the way). The crowd gets excited when the home team scores a goal or the action heats up, but they never go overboard, even if their team has just scored a late goal to pull ahead or the goalie makes a fantastic save. I have yet to see any developer really do great crowd sounds, though; I suppose it's harder than it seems.

It shouldn't have been hard to come up with good commentary though. However, the play-by-play and color commentary guys are just lame. They only have a few lines each, and they repeat them ad nausea; you might as well turn them off and do it yourself. All of the dialogue is also along the lines of (this isn't an exact quote) "John LeClair really became an important part of the Philadelphia Flyers' offense when he joined the team in a trade with the Montreal Canadiens during the 1994-1995 season." You'll never hear any comments that relate to the game that you're playing, no matter what's happening. Your star center could score six goals and the announcers will never mention what a great game he's having.

Having said that, I've worked my way to the worst part about NHL 2K, which has to be the AI. For some reason the computer-controlled players don't go after loose pucks and will dump the puck into the other team's end even if they're about to go on a breakaway or an odd-man rush. Even the players on your team behave in a bizarre manner. Countless times I crossed the blue line and passed the puck across ice to a teammate who I expected to be there but inexplicably wasn't. Many other times I'd press 'A' as I went to grab the puck and pass it, only to miss it (for some reason it's harder than it should be to take possession of a loose puck) and have my control switch to another player (since 'A' switches players also), upon which the first player would skate away and the other team would take over control of the puck.

The computer coaches also make some dumb moves, such as almost never pulling their goalie, even if there are, say, 10 seconds left in a one-goal game and there's a face-off in my end. They also call line changes seemingly every time their players are about to mount a rush up ice or the other team is barreling into their end. Plus, the developers decided to make the line change boxes really big so that they obscure part of the action when they come up on the screen, which can make it even harder to get your team under control.

I also found scoring more difficult than it should be. It seems like the only way to consistently score goals is to attempt a ton of one-timers; I had precious few blasts from the circle or shots on breakaways go into the net. I don't expect videogame hockey to be a really high-scoring affair, but it's frustrating when every contest has a 2-1 or 3-2 final. Over the course of a season you'll find that that translates to almost no players on your team making the top ten scorers in the league. On a related note, I don't understand why the mid-season All-Star Game uses a pre-set roster; the CPU should assign players to the teams based on how they're doing in the simulated season, not how they've done in real life, like the way Madden assigns players to the Pro Bowl.

If you want to play a season, be prepared to go through all 82 games (unless you want to simulate any of them) without the ability to shorten that number or set up a custom league. This is a shame, because many gamers like playing shortened seasons and have fun setting up leagues the way they want them -- I know I do.

Overall, NHL 2K looks amazing but plays very poorly. If you're a hard-core hockey fan, I'd advise passing it by for now and waiting for Black Box to improve the game's infrastructure before investing your hard-earned cash in it.

Review: Enjoyment

The game has its moments, but the lack of a solid AI backbone can make playing tedious sometimes.

Review: Graphics

Simply amazing. Better than NFL 2K, if you can believe that.

Review: Sound

Surprisingly poor. Lousy play-by-play and color work, and very little in the way of arena ambience such as a boisterous crowd and players yelling during the game.

Review: Replay Value

Okay, there's a season which you can play, but you can't play less than 82 games.

Review: Documentation

Even the booklet was bad. For example, there's nothing about playing with more than two gamers.

Production Credits

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