NHL Championship 2000

• Platform: IBM PC Compatible
• Release Date: November 04, 1999
• Genre: Sports
• Style: Hockey
• Similar Games: NHL 98 (IBM PC Compatible), ESPN National Hockey Night (Sega Genesis), NHL 98 (Sega Saturn), NHL 98 (PlayStation), NHL 98 (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), NHL 98 (Sega Genesis), ESPN National Hockey Night (Sega CD), ESPN National Hockey Night (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), NHL 99 (PlayStation), NHL 99 (Nintendo 64), NHL 99 [CD-ROM Classics] (IBM PC Compatible), NHL Blades of Steel 2000 (Nintendo 64), NHL 2K (Dreamcast), NHL 2000 (Game Boy Color), NHL FaceOff 2000 (PlayStation), NHL 2000 (IBM PC Compatible), NHL 2000 (PlayStation), NHL Blades of Steel 2000 (PlayStation), NHL Blades of Steel 2000 (Game Boy Color)

Game Description

Straight from your TV set to your PC comes Fox Sports Interactive's NHL Championship 2000. Choose from all 28 NHL teams -- including the expansion Atlanta Thrashers -- and get on the ice with real players in real arenas. There's even an option to choose which jersey (away, home, or a third choice) you want your club to wear, and the team select screen lets you know when two teams have a rivalry going between them, which means that you can expect more intense action when they go at it. You can also choose from two NHL all-star teams and 16 international clubs.

You'll hear all the action called by real life Fox Sports announcers Kenny Albert and John Davidson from the moment the teams take the ice to the final seconds of the third period. Plenty of controls are at your fingertips, from the ability to drop a pass to a teammate trailing behind you to devastating body checks to skating backwards. If two players get into a brawl, you can control the action of the one on your team and make him throw the punches. Just be aware that penalties can and will be called.

Depending on your level of hockey expertise, you can let the CPU handle the coaching for you or take control of it yourself. You can pick the strategies for your team and decide when to switch out the lines currently on the ice. If you decide to play an entire season you can play general manager as well, making trades with other teams as well as creating new players and editing the current ones. If your lines aren't performing up to par, you can tweak them as well. As the season progresses you can also view a wealth of league statistics as your team undertakes the march to the Stanley Cup.

During the game there are also plenty of little details which can help you play better. Turning on the passing arrows and passing targets will help you pass the puck around with more ease since you'll know who's open and who will receive the puck if you press the pass button. Fox Sports' Fox Trax technology is also available, which allows you to add a cool blue streak to passes and a hot red one to shots. Depending on the strength of your PC, you can add more detail to the player, ice and stadium detail or take it away.

There are six camera options to choose from as well as instant replays which are viewable at any time during the game. You can also play with various rules such as icing and two-line passes on or off, choose the strictness of the referee, decide on one of three difficulty levels to play at, and set the periods to 5, 10 or 20 minutes each. If you have a photo of yourself and want to really get into the game, you can create a new player and paste yourself on his face.

Roots & Influences

This game is the first in Fox Sports Interactive's series of NHL games; it faces stiff competition from EA Sports' own hockey franchise, which has been around since the early 1990s. Hockey games for home systems go back as far as 1981's Ice Hockey for the Atari 2600, which was the first to emulate the sport as well as the technology would allow at the time. As processors have improved over the years, sports game have come closer and closer to realistic action.

Review: Overall

NHL Championship 2000 is a good game, but overall it has too many negatives for me to place it on the same level as NHL 2000, which is easily the best hockey game I've ever played.

Let's start with the graphics. They're not as blocky looking as the ones in NHL 2000, especially when viewed from afar, but the level of detail just isn't there. You never get close to the players during stoppages in the action, and the animation can be choppy at times. The awkwardness of the animation really comes through when viewing replays: the players just don't look fluid and natural as they skate and take shots or deliver checks. Something's missing.

On the audio side, the game is mediocre. I like Kenny Albert and John Davidson's play-by-play and color commentary in general, but it's mostly pedestrian. For example, Davidson has a few tidbits about each player which he shares during breaks in the action, but he has very few situation-based comments other than ones such as "They're dominating this game in the shots category." While it's nice to hear about a certain player's history or how well he played last season, I want to hear about his performance as it relates to the game (or even season or tournament) at hand. Is he up or down? Is his performance what you'd expect from him or is his game off tonight? And, ideally, how does that relate to his performances in the last few games?

There's also a problem with synching the play-by-play to the action. Very often Albert will relate the action a few seconds after it's already happened, which is disconcerting.

The sound effects could have also been beefed up. The sounds you usually hear in a hockey game -- the whack of the stick against a puck, the clang of the puck off the goalpost, the thump of a player being slammed into the boards -- are either barely there or nonexistent. I had a few instances where Albert said my shot hit the post but I didn't hear it, for example. I wanted to hear the grunts of the players pushing each other around amid the swish-swish of their skates on the ice.

Hockey is a fast, intense and often brutal sport, but much of that feel simply isn't in this game. I never once had a hard, knock-him-out-of-his-skates body check no matter how many times I tried, and even the moments where grace and speed come into play, such as breakaways, were sorely lacking. While I like the two replays from different angles which you see every time there's a goal, the downside is that they really highlight the lack of fluidity in the animation. The players feel like they're simply being moved across the ice rather than really pushing against it with their skates.

So is there anything good about NHL Championship 2000? Well, the fact that this is a Fox Sports game means that their puck tracking technology is an option, which is nice. While it's a nuisance in TV broadcasts, I found that it helped to see a highlighted puck as it moved around the ice. And the addition of teams from various countries with the option to play a tournament with them is a nice touch. There's also a season mode, but it's missing the Dynasty (or Career or whatever you want to call it) mode which is just about a standard in sports games these days. Once you've played a season, you can only replay it; you can't age the players, conduct off-season moves, and start the next one, which is a shame.

If Fox Sports can institute that option and make a better attempt to capture the feel of a real hockey game, they could have a rival to EA's NHL series. Until then, this title is worthwhile only if you find it in a bargain bin.

Review: Enjoyment

I find most sports games enjoyable unless they're horrendous, but overall this isn't one I wanted to play to death.

Review: Graphics

They're nice, but something is missing from them overall.

Review: Sound

None of the intensity of a typical hockey game really ever comes through your speakers.

Review: Replay Value

The lack of a Dynasty mode really kills long-term play value.

Review: Documentation

The booklet is a bit on the skimpy side and doesn't have any game screens to illuminate what it's explaining.

Production Credits