430 - Wayne Gretzky Hockey

Wayne Gretzky Hockey endorsed by the greatest name in hockey. And welcome to Nestalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. Joe knows absolutely nothing about hockey, so it wasn't worth having him on this episode. You know, I would I would defend him here, uh, but we're no longer on speaking terms. Right.

So uh you know a lot about hockey. Your team, uh the Buffalo Sabres currently as of the recording is in the playoffs. I hope that's the recording. Yeah. They are currently at this very moment in game two, uh leading one nothing in the series against the Boston Bruins. Uh but that could change at any moment. So I'm doing my best to think about the podcast and not hockey.

Now what's crazy though, Sean, is that like, you know, we record a few weeks in advance and everything, but the NHL playoffs are so long that they're still going to be going on when this episode airs. Entirely possible that they have been long eliminated. by the time that this airs, uh but there's still m a lot of hockey to go. But just, you know, give me uh cut me some slack. It's been probably fifteen years since this team has been relevant and I don't know what to do with my hands.

Uh and and that's you know, that's twenty twenty six Buffalo Sabres. Uh and we're not gonna talk about well, maybe we should. Like nineteen ninety one Buffalo Sabres, were they a good team? Any idea what was going on? Sabers were good for their almost their entire existence.

until twenty eleven. And a and like there were w like the top five winning winningest franchises up until the drought. And uh it it's it's definitely a fall from grace. Like you had You had a lot of great gr a lot of great players on those on those nineties teams and um

I wasn't really aware back then, but it's still part of the history. And what's funny about this game is if you open up the manual You'll see a screenshot of this game in which you p you are playing as the uh Los Angeles Kings against the Buffalo Sabres, but in this game you cannot play as the Buffalo Sabres. You can barely play as half the teams. Very strange.

What is the I I couldn't couldn't even figure out a rhyme or reason to like who they include and didn't include, but I imagine since they do have players, then that m it must have been like about getting being able to get all the rights to players are. Mario Lemieux. Maybe they just couldn't get like you know,'cause the Rangers aren't here either, so it's like maybe they just couldn't get enough of the players on the team at the time. But the NFL it's not the NFL. The NHLPA was a thing.

Right. Not sure what's happening here and I don't know how to explain it because it is just such a Ran like we're used to games where it's like no no NHL players in the game, right? It's just like made up teams or just city names. But this one is doing like a really weird balance. uh and not and not balancing at all, if I'm being honest. It's falling over itself. Uh Of course it's named after the great one and uh Wayne Gretzky himself and

Don't w one thing I don't understand is why they named this game after the like the that one time coach of the Phoenix Coyotes. But you you can get into that if you want. Well, I was gonna get into that because I don't think we need to I don't think we need to explain to anybody why Wayne Gretzky's great, and we probably I'd probably do a pretty bad job, but in terms of like

the goat conversations of their respective sports, right? The the Michael Jordan, uh, the Babe Ruth, uh uh Wayne Gretzky Uh I suppose at the time of Wayne Gretzky you would have had like Ken Griffey as like the best in baseball but The Wayne Gretzky stat lines are really the one that just like make it so obvious that like, yeah, he actually is the goat. Like The true definition, it's the platonic ideal of dominance.

Right. It's just it's actually insane and I remember like you know, uh when I was watching hockey as a kid, Wayne Gritzky was on the Rangers, so that was exciting and everything. But like I didn't really appreciate what was going on until years later, uh, that crazy stat about how if you took every goal that Wayne Gretzky ever scored away from him, he would still be the all time points leader. Yeah. And that's like

It that's just not a it's not a fathomable stat. It's the no one can understand that. There's too much parody. I mean I you know if you think of parody as like a team thing and just like distributing talent, but the guy It it's just too much. Like it it be it's beyond reason.

So obviously even in nineteen ninety one Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player. Uh he's uh he's already had a successful stint with the Oilers, and at this point he's already on the Kings. The trade has already happened. Uh Yeah, the trade. The only trade that ever happened in the history of the NHL. And uh now Wayne Gretzky is putting his name on a uh on a video game

And the game promises realistic simulation hockey with uh multiple game speeds, animated refs, body checks, you name it, and it's all developed by Bethesda Software. Yeah. The same Bethesda that will create the Elder Scrolls. This is one of the weirdest like wait, they did this I've ever seen. Like did they do Wayne Gretzky's three D hockey? Uh you know, I was I was supposed to look into that and I'm pretty sure the answer is no. Favorite games as well.

Right well uh I will admit per I will admit that that game's bad, but yes, it is it is definitely a game I loved and no m uh Midway games uh takes over by that. And Midway, you know, they do great stuff with Of course. games so I'm forgiven for my sins. Uh but d you know, Bethesda uh oh and published by THQ by the way, who we mentioned uh what game was that? Was that Peter Pan and uh and the Pirates? Yeah, Peter Pan and the Pirates was THQ's first game.

we that we saw on the NES. So we're getting another one real quick here with Wayne Gretzky hockey. So you have Bethesda and you have THQ and That you know, I was looking into like what what what can I say about Bethesda other than the whole like, you know, the the people who created Fallout Three, Skyrim, Starfield, you know, the open world thing that we now turn into a meme, horse armor and all that stuff.

What what could I say? And I just want to say that like this is news to me because I don't uh live in Maryland, but they're called Bethesda because they were based out of Bethesda, Maryland. That is true. That just doesn't feel doesn't feel as fun as like what Bethesda like sparks into my brain. Like I don't think of like a town. I think of like I uh I only know that because they put um Th th they put their bombed out studio office into Fallout 3 Oh that's awesome.

Because it's very close to D C so I thought that was funny. And uh it's worth noting that uh they were making sports sims or sports games, and really not simulators, um, for a uh uh a good while at the beginning here. And uh this NES version of Wayne Gretzky hockey Uh was reportedly coded in a single night. And you'd know it. Ha ha ha. See th what I was gonna say is like I can almost see it. I can almost see what they mean by this like how accurate

things were gonna be with this game and it just it just couldn't get there in terms of hardware. Like do you do you know what I mean? Like It almost feels like It there's a bunch of systems that almost work in this game.

I agree with you. There's a there's a plan and and then they should have played their own game before shipping it because they would have known that the plan didn't work. And I think first and foremost It's all about the overhead view. The game uses a completely top down perspective. Not some cool like forty-five degree angle thing. Not not not like some side scrolling thing. It uses a complete top-down perspective.

Unlike any other sports game we've seen so far, And you know, being that far out, like with with fewer pixels and a smaller viewport, it creates a zoomed out, cluttered mess where players are really tiny and the puck is even smaller than them And it makes it really hard to read what the hell is even going on here.

It's so strange though, and I'm not even talking about like legibility here. I'm just talking about fidelity. Like We have seen some good stuff happen with football, with basketball, with soccer, with baseball, and hot like this is this looks like a A s like a five year old game at this point. Yes. And I think it's specifically because of just how bare minimum the players are represented. Like I think we are just used to

In a i in in the hockey games we've seen, a little more legibility into what's going on. And here it's really just like the sticks. You know, it's like it's like some some kind of like thin bodies or or wide bodies, depending on which way you have your character facing. And then just these like just these single stick lines that are like everything that matters in terms of how you shoot and how you you know, try to steal and it's really strange because it just It feels

It feels so weird to have games like ice hockey uh on the NES already, like laying out the blueprint so far in advance and then getting this and being like, Oh here's something different. It's like, yeah, it's there's a reason the other ones didn't do this.

Yeah, so uh t to get into what it feels like they're trying to do and to give them a little bit of grace here, um, like the the teams find their position. Like you ca like when you go into the offensive zone, they almost get into like an attack formation. The the face offs are correct. Um

the transitions you can kinda like they make sure they don't go off sides and really you're the only one that can force an off sides. Um Th there's like a lot of uh stuff that looks like AI working correctly until you actually try and play it. And that's if you can uh play it of course to overcome the crazy I mean, uh they just keep finding new ways to impress me, Sean. The menu system in this game.

Uh is just another it's it's not Sesame Street. It's a whole new way of trying to break my brain Yes, and and so and so like it's worth mentioning that as soon as you start up the game you're just greeted with a black screen with blue text just listing off a bunch of people who worked on the game and all that legal stuff and it's like all right, you're forgiven.

Then you get this kind of like cool little hockey thing for a second. And then you just go right into like there's no cool like pixel art version of Wayne Gretzky or anything. It's just the main the menu What do you mean? It's supposed to be him. He skates to center ice and like you know, he doesn't have a face. But that's... Oh you then just go to like a menu system of just like all right, you you know, like we gotta get through this computer garbage before you can get into this right, exactly.

Yeah. And And and then it has all these different things, player options and uh the player options, one player, two player, two players as a team, or computers only if you wanna watch. Remember that feature. And the the arrows next to one player, there's two of them on each side, and they are highlighted yellow.

And then there's arrows next to all the other things, but they're grayed out. And if you just press the start button, thinking that you're selecting one player, you're actually just agreeing to all of the prompts and the game begins. If you If you try to cycle through with like the select button, you will be cycling through the options themselves. Player options, period lengths, game speed, and game type. If you want to change

any of those things, you press the A button to move down in the list from one player to two player to two player team to computer only. Thankfully it won't then just go down to five minutes, ten minutes. If you have to again press the select button to move that stuff. But it is just like it's just too thought out of a menu here guys and it's just spells like it's gonna you know, it's a bad omen. See, I I kind of expected this because what I had read about this game was that not only was it

like a sports action game, but you could also like just just do the like the coaching. Like you could do you can call plays and all that. And what I didn't realize was that must have just been the like the PC version of the Because this that does not exist in this game. Yeah. A and an another part of this game that's really tough when you get into it is player switching in general. If if a player on your team gets the puck, the game doesn't auto switch you to that player.

This is sort of the NBA jam formula, but what they didn't realize is that NBA jam works because uh there's only Yeah, right. Yeah. Exactly. As here, like I think it this game almost might have worked if it just would auto switch to the puck holder. The puck handler. And maybe you'd be able to actually set up some poise and some one timers if it just did that, but it just did not do that.

Yeah. Every NEH NES hockey game before this understood that when the puck changes possession, you need to be controlling the player who has it. Ice hockey did that, Blades of Steel did that. Wingretzky hockey has you mashing select enough times to cycle through your entire team. Hopefully you get lucky and it's just the very next guy, but most times you gotta cycle through a few players to switch the to the guy that has the puck. Yeah, he's probably shot it, right?

Or he's drifted off sides and you gotta you you have to uh re enter. Um it's it's so it it's so silly. Like, even if they just had if if you could shout commands Like you can you can force your teammates to pass to you, but you can't force your teammates to shoot. which really removes any kind of uh strategizing that uh if they if they were f if they were really focused on making this Scheme works. They would at least need to have that button.

Yeah, and and keep in mind too, it would be okay, right, if the AI was like somewhat competent that like, okay, well, even though I'm not controlling this player right now, they're still gonna play hockey, right? It's like they're not

playing hockey. I don't know where I don't know where their heads are, but they're not they're not understanding the fundamentals of hockey because they don't position themselves for passes y you know, like if you have possession, they're not like setting up formations or anything. They're they're literally just kinda

Drifting through ice in this game. like against the boards and it's sort of it it's now coming up on the other side towards the defense. Like you see the defense pinch. Like they pinch and they try and stop the puck from Uh exiting the offensive zone and what would happen in any other circumstance is that that player or that computer player would then now possess the puck. What happens here is that they just get close, but never grab the puck.

And so they're they're they're almost like kind of pantomiming hockey, and unless you're actually interacting with it, no hockey actually occurs. Whoever has control of the puck starts. flickering between their color of their jersey and um and white. So it's it looks like it's like that traditional like NES glitchy flickering, but it's bu it's it's by design to do it that way.

But then there's also flickering too, if like too many sprites are lined up in the same way, like there's just that kind of flickering too. And You know, that's like that's a technical problem that I I g I guess I could kind of forgive, but I can't understand why, like, is the flickering supposed to be like Wayne Gretzky's hockey's equivalent to like the highlighter puck? From the NHL broadcasts? Like

I I i i I think that there were very limited ways to indicate who the puck holder is or who you're controlling, so I can forgive this in its entirety. Um, but that that's the least of its worries. Yeah. I I mean it's it's ten skaters on the ice plus the goalies, and the weirdest thing that you can do, which I I couldn't believe it, it was the first thing I had to do in the game, which was a

It's a it's a it's a it's a bad thing for me to do'cause I should have learned how to play the game first before just seeing how far I could break it. But you can pick to be um The Los Angeles Kings and then have your opponent be the Los Angeles Kings as well. And so everybody's just wearing white jerseys and it's like there's no way to tell who's on whose team or whatever. That's pretty awesome actually.

Yeah, it just looks like a big blobby mess. It looks like uh it looks like it's ten V uh or eleven V one uh out there on the ice. But um But, you know, if you do play it, presume you know, like with with the teams not being the same, the only way to tell is is just the color of the jerseys, which is a very simple, like, whole Yeah. You know, fill in of just like this color. Like you're all blue, you're all pink. Like okay.

And and then all the colors are just sort of close enough to the team that they're trying to emulate. Um I have a couple other major head scratcher decisions that are are are less insane as not having uh you can automatically control the puck handler. Um one is only slightly less damning, which is that pass and shoot are the same button.

And it's entirely based on the direction that you're holding. Uh if you are kind of shooting, if you're if you're kind of moving the puck towards the net, you will shoot. Otherwise you will pass. Um it's it's a very strange decision. And um then the other one is more so like just graphic design. uh the the HUD or like just the info on the screen telling you the score and time left in the period is not like a superimposed

sort of graphic, it is baked into the screen. So you will have to if you want to know Um the score how many goals your opponent has scored so far, you will have to go towards the right side of the rank. Well, just like the players uh uh on the real ice, right? Don't they have to look up at the jumbotron to figure out how much time's left and stuff?

You know, I did think it's like oh it's like oh they're just doing like physical everything's physical, but like no that's That's that's t giving them too much credit, I think.

And you know, this isn't y you're giving up good you're bringing up good points about the actual game. Uh I'm looking for uh ways to continue to talk about uh things other than the mechanic. So uh I want to put a note in here about uh for the collectors out there, there are three different versions of this cartridge. Uh one with Wayne Gretzky having a black King's jersey, one with him having a white King's jersey, and another one where he wears the white jersey but with no THQ logo.

And that that variant is notably rarer and commands higher prices in the collector's market. So I feel like that's one of those ones that like you might not even know you have it. Right? Because you just think you have a copy of Wayne Gretzky's hockey, but like if you do own a copy, go check which version you have. You might have the white version with the no THQ logo and not even know it. How much is that mu uh how much more is that worth?

I'm gonna look that up while we talk'cause I do have another note about just collector things in general on the NES. A weird thing that like you don't see elsewhere is that uh NES cartridges also have like three screw versus five screw. Right. No no yeah, it's really weird. And like the the five screw ones

uh command I think like a higher pre it's one or the other. Like one commands like a significantly higher premium. It's not just considered like a variant. It's like oh no, this one just doesn't exist that much. So it's like hundreds of dollars more than the other one. And like that kind of collecting Is where I think I draw. That's dumb. I'm just gonna say it's dumb. Uh I don't agree with it.

Right,'cause what's stopping me from just trying to find a cheaper game with five screws and put it in that? Ha ha. My am I crazy? Can I just remove some screws? Like wait wait wait, is the one with more screws more valuable or less screws? Uh you're gonna make me look now, aren't ya? Don't look. Don't look. The people need to know hold on, hold on. Screws and maybe X. Five screw. Five screw is is is more rare. Remember that game Gotcha the Sport, the paintball game?

Oh yes, okay, that's a$300,000 game with five screws. Five screw it's fifteen hundred dollars, but still it's probably like a it's probably like a ten dollar game if it's three screw. You know, it's like it's like how does that how who's deciding? Uh Wayne Gretzky hockey um black black jersey eight dollars, white jersey twenty three dollars, white jersey no THQ logo fifty dollars. That's kind of a big deal.

Uh I'm I'm at least going to grant that that is within a reasonable amount of dollars that someone might part with to buy a video game. So I'm not going to hit it on that one. Okay now Wayne Gretzky number thirty two so he's in the Oilers uniform Funko Pop. How much you think that is? I don't even wanna guess. Is it is it three hundred and fifty dollars? N you you know the Funko market is dead. oh is ityeah i wouldn't know that

Well oh sorry, I I thought you knew it's just like everybody's trying to like offload these things now. It's like it says it's twenty three dollars, which is obviously on the low end anyway, but like you good luck getting twenty three dollars for that. Like who you the Funko market has completely collapsed, people. I feel like there's th I mean like that's still like you can melt that plastic down and and and make like a fidget spinner with it. That's worth twenty three dollars.

Every fidget spinner's worth twenty three dollars. That's what they used to charge for them when they were all the range. Yeah. Now Bethesda is credited with the creation of um the first physics based sports simulation game, a game called Gridiron in nineteen eighty-six. Uh Electric Arts uh EA was working on the first John Matthew. Electronic arts. I said electric.

I'm just reading so fucking fast here. I'm just trying to get this episode over. I have like a gun to my head and I'm like fucking stop reading. Uh electronic arts. That's why I actually I feel like I knew I said it wrong'cause that's why I said E A'cause Stick with electric guards. Electric Arts was working on the first John Maiden football game and and they hired Bethesda to help finish developing it.

But the next year Bethesda sued EA for seven point three million dollars, claiming EA halted the release of gridiron while incorporating many of its elements into Madden. The case was resolved out of court. I don't I feel like this story doesn't mean much to me. Like I don't have enough information to make a decision here. You agreed to help them make that other game that was your football game.

I'm trying to think of a world in which Bethesda makes Madden and I it just is not commu compute. So I I I I'm disregarding this. But man, imagine story mode. Open world mana. Terrible writing. Yeah. Well I mean what would be different. Exactly. Okay. Uh Blades of Steel. Did we mention this on the Blades of Steel episode? It it's been like a decade, so I'm just gonna say it again.

Uh Konami used uh a photo of Wayne Gretzky and uh Thomas Johnson, uh, from the nineteen eighty three Stanley Cup finals as the basis for the Blades of Steel box art. So they Altered their likeliness just enough so that likeliness, likeness. I'm having a terrible time today. Can't say it. It's okay. But they altered them, uh, and the uniform so that this way they couldn't be sued. So, uh, it's just worth b the reason why I have it here, obviously, is because even though

uh the game wasn't named after him. This isn't even Wayne Gretzky's first appearance on the box of an NHL game.

It's like uh all all your favorite comic book artists such as Trace Things, you know? Yep. The man was unavoidable, he was the sport, and we are the podcast, and we always do the essential games list. Sean. So yeah, so just as an update, um the Sabres are tied zero zero heading into the second period of game two of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Um I I think that this game would be closer to if

We were entering the second period, losing three nothing, entering the second period of game two after losing game one. Uh basically what I'm trying to say is that like this is a really bad hockey game. Um which is really frustrating because like you can almost see little moments where it's like, oh, this could have been interesting. Like it's more about the direction of your your stick that that uh has to do with

what kind of shot you produce and if it's going to be saved. Stuff that you wouldn't see again until uh EA's NHL games entered like uh like the twenty tens. Um And It just like it doesn't look good. It doesn't have any presentation. The presentation is actually worse than you could think of because of how everything's baked into the screen. You have to like pan to see anything. Um There's not a lot to like here. Um yes.

You will see uh refs give actual like penalty sort of pantomimes, but that other than that, there's really nothing going on. Um not essential. And just as an update over here, the New York Metropolitans are trying to snap an eleven game losing streak as of tonight, uh, before they make it a twelve. It is the bottom of the sixth and the Mets are winning 3-2, but when we started recording it was 3-0 and uh Nolan McLean, the starting picture, had a no-hitter going, um, which was exciting.

Now all hope is lost and I feel like it's just a matter of time before they lose this game and maybe never win another game of baseball as long as I live. Now, uh, in terms of this game I feel about the same amount of despair watching the Mets as I was playing this game. This is the first time in a long time where uh and you know, listeners I tell you this in confidence

I could not play much of this game because I just frankly didn't want to. Uh oftentimes I will uh play a video game a lot just to, you know, see enough of it to talk about it confidently on this podcast. This was not one of those games. Uh this was the rare occasion where I hated it so much that I just said, I don't need to invest this much time. I look at the long play

on YouTube, which is twenty three minutes and thirty two seconds, and they probably have me beat by about five minutes or so. I really um I really didn't like this one. I'm not I'm I'm not trying to be like I'm not saying it's like one of the worst games ever. It's just one of these things where it was just like right away I was like, Nope, I've seen better hockey on this uh on this system. I don't need this. And that happens all the time, right? Like there are

genres all the time where you first you know, like imagine if you first on PS two get like Grand Theft Auto three, right? It's like A lot of other uh, you know, of the of of that genre, the third person shooter adventure game on the PS two are it's gonna be tough.

To to adjust backwards, right? It's like I feel like that's just what happened here with Wayne Gretzky. It's really hard to like play ice hockey and blades of steel and be like, Yeah, sure, I'll try this. It's like this just doesn't work for good reason.

I I think they they made the wrong call with the extreme top down view, as if you are literally d from the Jumbotron's POV in the center of the ice. It just doesn't work. I don't like it. I do Uh like some other versions of Wayne Gretzky's hockey though, so there is hope. Jane Gretzky's 3D hockey. He's a brick walled. And then he turns into a brick wall in in Wing Gritzky's three D hockey the goalie. That's pretty cool. He's also uh he he could go on fire. You turn on fire in that game.

Bruin just scored. Oh, so we should probably stop. I stop recording, I'm gonna go cry now.