Ice Hockey & MLB retrospective: Sports memorabilia | NES Works
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 ก.ย. 2024
- A pair of old-school sports games this week-one whose quality and playability transcends its visuals, and ones whose quality and playability... do not. Nintendo's Ice Hockey, developed in collaboration with NES Volleyball creators Pax Softnica, distills the essence of the sport into a take whose simplistic style makes possible some truly accessible, fast-paced gameplay that transcends its genre. It's a remarkable game in many respects!
Major League Baseball is a mediocre Famista clone whose sales pitch consists entirely of, "We have real team names." Your mileage will vary, greatly.
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its TH-cam debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.
Ice Hockey was a staple of Canadian households for years to come.
If you say to a Canadian, "wanna play some hockey?" They'll grab some skates. If you say, "wanna play some Ice Hockey?" They'll grab their NES.
Yeah this is the second game i got on NES. First was pro wrestling (not counting SMB obvs)
I will never understand why so many people claim Blades of Steel is a better hockey game... it looks more like the real thing, but it plays worse and also the whole if you lose a fight you go to the penalty bench thing is...not how hockey works. Truth be told though the best Hockey game on NEs is probably Wayne GRetzky hockey but nobody played that. At least not the NES version.
Thankfully when the snes came around we finally got great hockey games with NHL 93 and 94.
Very accurate
I don't think that's a goalie on the cover. Unless he forgot his gear at home.
This is the goalie equivalent of skinny dipping
That's Brian Leetch of the New York Rangers, a defenseman.
Yeah i almost did a spit take. Im gonna guess jeremy doesn't watch any hockey :-p.
@@richardkim9952 I never realised this was a NHL player until now, i watched hockey then too, and obviously know leetch by name and have seen him play. I guess i never paid much attention to his face! He even has rangers colors on the box...
I don’t usually check comments but I had to come here to confirm this was corrected 😂😂 also, “field goal attempt”
Legion Of Luigis is the name of my band's next EP
I don't know why, but I always love seeing content creators that I subscribe to enjoying and commenting on each other's work.
SNES drunk, when are you getting Jeremy on the podcast? I'd buy that for a dollar.
@@isaiahconstante2206 or Jeremy could get SNESDrunk for Retrodrunks!
I didn´t play Ice Hockey until decades later and was stunned by how fun it is. Kind of like an ice hockey NBA Jam...
I have fond memories of playing this game with my dad, who died several years ago. Only game I could ever get him to play, but it is a well I return to when I miss him.
Most of the kids I knew back then swore by Blades of Steel but Ice Hockey was always my jam. The fact that I more recently got my nephew to play me in it and he was totally digging it is proof enough for me that it still holds up.
The fact that A passes the puck, but B switches players on defense messes with my brain so hard.
I absolutely love this channel because of all of the in-depth information. I can't until you talk about Blades of Steel. That was my real introduction to hockey.
Thanks again
My dad and I used to have heated Ice Hockey matches where we would bet 25 cents per goal, which was a great boost to my allowance in the third grade.
Also, as a Polish household, we appreciated the ability to pick a team from Poland. 🇵🇱
Also, also, and for the record, my go-to team was a mix of three big guys and one skinny.
Can't believe you didn't mention the all-out brawls that would break out in Ice Hockey, with the loser getting sent to the penalty box. Some of my friends didn't even care about the score, they just wanted to fight
I am a longtime fan of yours, and boy am I glad I saved most of these videos for a rainy day. I injured my back recently and have been able to do basically nothing but lay in bed, and these have been keeping me sane.
MLB was the first time my dad played video games with me. I still send him screengrabs of it occasionally to make him laugh.
I understand why people prefer blades of steel, but to me what makes ice hockey is how much fun it is to control. just feels really loose and hectic, probably my favorite nintendo-made sports game next to punch-out.
I dont like much sports games but Ice Hockey is a perennial favourite. I love how obvious everything is, such a clear game for new players. The lil fellas are adorable, too!!
Ice Hockey was definitely an improvement over Nintendo's earlier sports games. I just wish it had a tournament mode with all of the countries competing for the world championship.
My brother and I used to legit have wars in Ice Hockey. We cranked it up to maximum speed. After a while it got interesting because we would attempt to do change the player types per team to find the maximum advantage. I never have gotten so pissed of that a controller got broken. It got so fucking intense that the only time it happened. So many great memories of Ice Hockey.
I have fond memories of playing ice hockey with my brother when we were kids. Even though we are from Mexico, and knew nothing about hockey we quickly understood the gameplay mechanics and had a blast every time we played. Good times indeed.
the music in ice hockey gets me immensely nostalgic for the game room my mom set up in the basement with all our nes games
I like how the end of the hockey stick becomes the middle prong of the second E on the Ice Hockey box. That’s a nice touch.
Ice Hockey is one of those games that everyone seems to really like, and I didn't have much idea why. It looked like a good game, but no better than some of the other black box sports games, like Pro Wrestling or Golf. Now I get it.
(Adding it in the comments so I don't lose the heart icon) - There's depth to this game. It's fast paced, easy to pick up and play, and doesn't have the "NES Sports game theme" on it's title screen. You summed this up brilliantly Jeremy! I might get a copy!
That and it's made even better when comparing it to ANOTHER version of Tiny Pipsqueak Baseball.
@@TheSmart-CasualGamer Ice Hockey is one of my top ten NES games and I'm not a sports guy. It really shines with friends since anyone watching can go, "Well, what if you had a team of 4 fat guys?" and you can hand them a controller "A to pass, B to shoot and switch guys let's go."
@@Megoodfilmguy That settles it. I'm grabbing a copy.
@@TheSmart-CasualGamer Ice Hockey's cheap if you want to pick it up. A loose copy sells for $5 Canadian at my local retro video game store. It was also released for Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online.
@@Ginormousaurus Wait, can you play vs. online with other people?
You got some great little jokes in here, Jeremy. I giggled irl.
Ah, yes, my favorite sport. I love to dribble the ball down the hockey field and pass the club for a spike to get a touchdown.
Hey, now. WWF Wrestlemania Challenge is possibly the best wrestling game on the NES.
Bases Loaded was probably the best of the NES library at that time. Sort of surprised it wasn't mentioned for comparison, as it also had a 1988 release in North America. Heck, it was even the top baseball game by the end of 1988, and 7th overall in the Nintendo Power top 30 list. MLB? Didn't even rank.
Is that Wario Wood's music in Hockey??? Am I crazy now, was I unobservant for a few decades?
*Wario's Woods'
Ice Hockey has the comfiest sound track of all time.
There's a great piano cover of the OST here:
th-cam.com/video/R80SaTjWbSo/w-d-xo.html
Only downside is the main game theme was different in Japan, which this cover plays instead. Still good to hear the option menu, though!
As a Canadian, I'm obligated to say that Ice Hockey for NES is objectively the best NES sports title. My opinion is valid; all others are void.
That said, I'm amazed at just how far the NES Works series has been going!! I cannot believe it's already episode #077, and I'm always wondering how much left there is to cover.
Excellent content as always, Jeremy~!!
Had ice hockey growing up, good memories. Although I slightly preferred blades of steel.
Ice Hockey has some of my favorite NES music. Love this game.
Ice Hockey was the the only video game my grandmother ever got me. The Christmas after my household and my cousins’ got our respective NES consoles, she got a single game for each grandkid. One of my cousins and I each got Ice Hockey. My brother and my other cousin, I don’t even remember what they got. We proceeded to play the three new games the entire day. Only leaving the TV for dinner.
She vowed to never buy another video game again.
Your team of lanky Canadians was a team of Bob Mackeys ! No wonder they lost at hockey.
Bob is not Canadian YET
Great video, Jeremy, even if my inner hockey fan cried out in pain when you referred to the puck as a "ball" and skaters as "fielders."
I was drawing parallels to NES Soccer by using soccer terms, and each time I immediately followed it with the correct hockey term to drive the point home. Seems pretty straightforward?
These videos are worth watching just to fondly remember the old boxes I forgot.
Seeing MLB next to Ice Hockey made me very hopeful that MLB was also gonna be a forgotten banger of a gams
"...Using gobs of cash to simulate quality." So over 40 years of gaming and nothing has changed.
IMHO Ice Hockey is the single best sports title on the NES.
The Swedish flag (and jerseys) show one of the strange quirks of the NES hardware, that it didn't had any real yellow color out of 50-ish colors.
I've read that that's why Kirby is pink. Nintendo and Hal were arguing about what color he should be, yellow, white or pink, and the NES's color palette decided the argument for them.
The Marios in Ice Hockey are by far the best characters
Growing up this is one of those games I always associated with the system even though I never played it at the time. It was always there on store shelves at Hills and other stores when I'd go in look longingly at the NES and eventually save my money up to buy one. I've always meant to pick up a copy for my current collection and this video got me looking seriously into doing that.
Ice Hockey and I have a great history. I played it ALL THE TIME with my dad. Much fun were had.
Ooh, recreating the 1972 USSR-Canada hockey series in a 1988 NES game in 2021! :D
Man, it's not even funny how interchangeable most 8-bit baseball games were. Like I know that I played quite a few on the NES over the years, but I have NO distinct memories of any of them except Basewars. Probably because it was the only one that tried to be memorable.
Baseball stars? You could build your own roster, make money after a win to sign free agents, and climb the wall to steal home runs.
Baseball Simulator 1.000 had 18 teams you could edit, superhuman "ultra plays", and six different stadiums, including one in outer space.
Could somebody explain why there's like five bases loaded games?
@@TheSmart-CasualGamer There was an arcade game known in Japan as Moero!! Pro Yakyuu ("Burn!! Pro Baseball"), four Bases Loaded games for the NES, another Moero!! Pro Yakyuu game for the Famicom that was never released outside Japan, three Super Bases Loaded games for the SNES, and Bases Loaded '96: Double Header for the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. I guess the series was profitable for Jaleco.
Speaking of Jaleco, they developed and published the next NES Works' featured game City Connection. I always considered them a middling video game company. Their games were usually neither great or terrible.
@@Ginormousaurus Well, TH-cam didn't notify me of your reply. Shame, as that was a great read. And I agree on your opinion on Jaleco.
NES Ice hockey without mentioning fighting?
Ice Hockey is one of the few non-licensed games to have a photo cover.
The Ice Hockey vs. Blades of Steel debate still rages on. BoS was the one I grew up with, so I'm a little bias, but they both bring something unique to the table. Definitely the two tentpole hockey games of the NES, maybe the 8-bit era in general.
IH has some nice touches, like the secret codes which get rid of goalies and the crazy frictionless puck. Also, if you notice, if the score is close nearing the end of the final period, the crowd won't stop roaring.
I guess I'm one of those people who fondly remembers MLB baseball, simply because it was one of the few games I had when I got my NES, which I'm sure is because it was the baseball game available when my parents bought my NES. I'm pretty sure my dad played against me a few times on it. He was a pretty early adopter of video games, playing some sort of handheld electronic baseball game at the hospital when I was born in 1981, according to my mother at least. He seemed to prefer the simplicity of the early games though, as he didn't really get into Nintendo.
Still got my copies of both!
I'd forgotten that I played a ton of Ice Hockey with my brother on the Wii VC release.. what an absolutely perfect little game.
"...and two non-existent, made-up kingdoms called USSR and Czechoslovakia." Hoping this is a joke. They were both real at one point in history, despite having completely different names now.
Are you serious? This changes everything! Holy crap!
You spent the whole Ice Hockey review ALMOST scoring! OMG if you didn’t end with a score I was gonna flip! Another ace vid, JP!
Ahh Ice Hockey I have many fond memories of this game including beating dad, and a friend of the family in back to back games with an IV in one hand during one of my many, many hospital stays during the NES and SNES eras.
Great video! Both this and blades of steel were staples as a young hockey fan.
I hate to be "that guy" but as a hockey nut I had to mention that the box art of Ice Hockey doesn't feature a goalie, it's just a regular skater standing near an (for some reason) empty hockey net. Sorry for the pedantry. (00:42-00:50)
He's a naked goalie. Just out there daring you to go for the score.
This is the only sports NES game that i didn't play.
Love your sports game entries. Your eventual reaching of Tecmo Bowl is actually something I look forward to in life.
I totally prefer MLB over Baseball, RBI Baseball, and Bases Loaded 1 & 2. Base Wars is the best NES baseball game I ever played, though.
Ice Hockey is one of my all time favorite NES games. It's so much fun!
Ice Hockey is great but as soon as Blades of Steel entered the scene, I never touched it again.
I disagree that Blades of Steel isn't as "pickup and play". Having the 4 sizes of players made Ice Hockey somewhat more complex than it needed to be.
Blades of Steel is far superior. I'll even go as far to say that Ice Hockey is kinda crap.
BoS let you play Gradius between periods. No contest.
Did you know thay LJN's MLB was the subject of a lawsuit in 1990? The problem wasn't the glitches, but the lack of player names and outdated rosters.
A 9-year old bought the game and complained over the game lacking player names and inaccurate rosters. He and his family tried to return it, but would only be allowed an exchange for a new copy if their copy was defective. The family sued LJN, Nintendo, and MLB, but by the end of 1990, the judge dismissed the suit. The family appealed, but later withdrew it.
The plaintiffs' biggest flaw in this case-- They didn't know caveat emptor.
It's weird how they used TCH as a shortcut for Czechoslovakia. The "TCH"(Tschechien) is more of a german way to say Czechia.
"TCH" was the International Olympic Committee code for Czechoslovakia, based on the French translation "Tchécoslovaquie".
Oh...i haven't heard about that even when i'm Czech.
I remember going in on Ice Hockey heavy when I was like 8yrs old..borrowed it off my bud a couple times. The heavy set "Mario/Ron Jeremy" character * 😂
My goodness. The laughs we had due to the super crappy performance of M.L.B. baseball. That game made my friends and me laugh sooo hard, so many times. It was so cheap, cheesy and poorly made that it was epic.
Nintendo ice hockey is so much fun.😁😁
Rad Racer wasn't first party. It was by Square, and Nobuo Uematsu did the music.
It was published, distributed, and marketed by Nintendo in the U.S., which makes it a first-party release here.
@@JeremyParish No, that makes it a Second Party game like Kung Fu.
We loved playing Ice Hockey as kids. It was so much fun, I still remember the first time I played it, a rental, haha. Such great memories. :)
Somehow, I really like how most conventional sports video games control on NES more than their 3D HD counterparts. Really need to try out Ice Hockey now.
I’m 99.999% sure the “made up kingdoms” line is a joke. But I feel like someone of a certain age might genuinely be serious.
I remember finding Super Blood Hockey back when it was a small XNA project on itch.io. It was definitely channelling NES Ice Hockey and resonated with my friends who grew up with the game.
Great video games.
Loved ice hockey but was not very good at it lol
I adore ice hockey, one of the best playing sports games made for the NES. Team Four Fats for life.
I got my NES for my birthday in 1988. Besides the pack-in SMB/Duck Hunt, my grandparents bought me Major League Baseball. All my friends had RBI Baseball and gave me shit, but I absolutely loved it. I still play it to this day.
International hockey legend, team Poland
Ice Hockey seemed to have been a rather big hit with NES owners of the time, being the first game of the sport and several folks writing into Nintendo Power were bummed about sellouts of the title. Then again, it's from Nintendo Power, and so everything printed there has to be weighed in with the fact it's a Nintendo publication that just puffs up their own brand where possible.
Nintendo Power started out surprisingly even-handed for a self-avowed Nintendo rag, I'm told it's because when Nintendo entered North America, their aim was to boost the value of their brand by creating an info pipeline to customers, and exaggerating the merits of inferior games would perform a twofold sabotage to this aim, diminishing their info's perceived value and the perceived value of their console's game library.
Ice was great, on the level of r.c. pro am etc., if it had better box art, like nice pixel art, it would be considered a lot more these days.
Ice Hockey music by Soyo Oka, same composer as Pilotwings and Sim City. One of my favorite Nintendo composers.
Ice hockey nes works in January is a nice touch. Big fan of your work, and dedication. It’s so interesting to see ideas reused over and over again.
Soccer to ice hockey, Rad racer + excitebike ending up f-zero etc. Nintendo, like apple, has a real knack for repacking products with slightly different ideas, every few years. That’s not sarcastic either. It’s a call out to their continual evolution and growth.
Yeah its kinda like the black box sports games, except its good.
I first played Ice Hockey as a kid on a friend's old hand me down NES well into the Gamecube era and was surprised how fun it still was.
Not fun enough to stop us playing Melee the rest of the night, of course, but closer than most games get.
Just last week I watched an Oingo Boingo documentary and who should show up on this week's NES Works?
It's downright spooky sometimes.
Ice Hockey in Japan had some different music from our version. I'm not sure how true this is, but someone said that supposedly, Nintendo their native Japan as the "testing grounds". He says it was a smart move when you think about it.
Ice Hockey is still fun to this day. On the other hand, Major League Baseball was an awful game. Hits would suddenly come to a dead stop on the ground, and the throws from the field were so slow. Any grounder to third base was an automatic infield hit because you would never get the ball to first in time.
I’m always curious who the first person to dislike a video like this within minutes is or what their motives are. Love your channel and content!
i do it at random just to piss in peoples corn flakes... makes me feel like i exist...
My memory always has RBI and Ice hockey coming out earlier than MLB. But “release dates” for us was when either we or a friend FOT a new game
Blades of steel is better in my opinion - mini games between periods, fight sequences, and shoot-out mode in a tie game made for a really rich experience! I did like choosing my own players in Ice Hockey, though.
Hmm, the next video won't load. I'd better check my City Connection.
The likes of LJN and Tecmo sure were a bit miserly when it comes to licensing for their sports games, how they would license EITHER the Players Association for a given sport, or the league itself, but not both.
license the MLBPA, you get actual players, but their teams aren’t named ('cept by city) and their uniform colours are a bit off.
license the MLB itself, and you get the reverse.
Tecmo bowl was the football game to license both I think. Even though the roster was 2-3 years old.
@@jaredbrown691 Tecmo Super Bowl
We always called them "the fat guy, the skinny guy, and the medium guy". Im not into sports, and I miss the sports games like Ice Hockey that werent realistic but just fun.
I know you haven’t gotten there yet for one of these, but in my neighborhood, Nintendo Baseball meant R.B.I. or Bases Loaded 2.
Same here. Also throw in Bad News Baseball & SNK's Little League Baseball as go to baseball games.
I liked Baseball Stars and Baseball Simulator 1.000.
@@Ginormousaurus Baseball Starts was dope.
I remember renting Ice Hockey numerous times. Highly entertaining game!
Nothing FELT as satisfying to play as Ice Hockey at the time, and even now looking back its easy to see why. Fast and smooth action with a GIANT easy to see puck and the passes and pickups hit with perfect little chirps and the animations pack a lot of charm into little guys, like with sticks up victory animation.
This action definitely feels like a progenitor to the EA Sports line that would come to dominate the 90s, but the personality would give way to Licenses. I have a feeling that some well made non-licensed story based sports games might have a place in the West market these days - Can you imagine a Tell-Tale like game where instead of (or in addition to) player choices it is outcomes big and small during games that decide the fate of your characters.
I'm certain these exist in Japan, but like... Friday Night Lights the game with a simple but solid football game at its core and wrapped up in Texas football small town nonsense.
Three Fat Guys and One Skinny Guy, the best team
Good god the first LJN game to appear
Nope, LJN debuted in 1987
Nope, that was Gotcha!
3:49 big fan of that joke.
The junior high schools of America and the war of Ice Hockey vs. Blades of Steel. Lol
I liked both games, but I always found Ice Hockey to be more fun.
The only part of Blades of Steel I liked was the Gradius boss fight you'd get between the 2nd and 3rd period sometimes. Ice Hockey was the objectively better game, and I played absolute tons of it back in the day. Two chunky/two normal team for life!
It goes without saying that Ice Hockey and Blades of Steel were both popular in Canada. They're both good games and both did some things better than the other. Ice Hockey offers more strategy by letting you choose different types of players for your team. Blades of Steel has a tournament mode and more emphasis on fighting. When it comes to graphics it depends on whether you prefer Nintendo's cartoony characters or Konami's more realistically proportioned figures.
@@Damaniel3 I’m a big Gradius fan, so I loved that part.
(I know this doesn't have anything to do with the NES itself, but anyways:)
9:39 Okay those graphics literally made my drop, what with the big sprites and view akin to a pre-rendered PS1 game with fixed camera angles. How common are such things on the intelivison? This shit looks way to impressive for it's time
Edit: since you mentioned Megami Tensei II, are you ever going to tackle any of the SMT games in your series? (Other than Jack Bros. since you've done that already). I'm a big fan of the series, and I'd be interested to hear your take on it
I'm more immused on how a kid tried to sue LJN for not having the MLB player names in the game than the game itself.
Blades of Steel.
Thanks Jeremy for making a calming video on two NES sports games. A very needed distraction after the tumultuous events of January 6, 2021. I played both, Ice Hockey is definitely the superior of the two but would be outshined by Konami's Blades of Steel.
Never seen that Luigi vs Mario trick in Ice Hockey before. Always learning something new on this channel. Can’t wait for the Blades of Steel episode. And hopefully you’ll be able to cover the Japan only Kunio-Kun hockey game.
Well, it's not really a trick... just a visual similarity I stumbled across by chance.
Definitely big fan of Ice Hockey. The only one of those early sports games that kept my attention as a kid. Blades of Steel and others were fun in their differences, but Ice Hockey might have been my favorite until we get to the 16 bit generation.