Pros: Excellent gameplay, good graphics (all things considered), very true-to-life
Cons: Annoying play-by-play, some glitches, no franchise mode - nothing big
The bottom line: Despite the glitches and flaws that could ruin any lesser game, NHL 2K2 set a new standard for simulation hockey gameplay, strategy and realism.
We’re right smack dab in the first round of the NHL playoffs, in all its glory. The big hits, fast skating and exciting gameplay have me literally glued to my Laz-E-Boy, taking in games by teams that I normally wouldn’t care about. The NHL playoffs, are bar none, the most exciting playoffs in pro sports, and the Stanley Cup is truly the most difficult award to win in pretty much all of professional sports. But I’m not here to give a history lesson on what is truly the greatest sport ever conceived, I’m here to pay tribute to it, with my review of Sega Sports NHL 2K for the Sega Dreamcast gaming system. There’s no way that a game can fully achieve the excitement, suspense, and passion of watching or participating in a sport (nothing beats those six hour street hockey marathons), but NHL 2K2 comes about as close as possible to achieving that spirit as the Dreamcast could possibly allow. NHL 2K2 is flawed, and feels rushed at times, but it is perhaps the purest example of what real ice hockey is - at least it was until the release of NHL 2K3 for X-Box, Playstation 2 and GameCube, a game that took large steps forward in graphics and gameplay but really failed to make any major impressive changes.

The road to the release of NHL 2K2 was a long and arduous one. Essentially the last Dreamcast game to be commercially released in most of the world (Japan being the large exception, where there were still releases for a couple of months afterwards) in early February of 2002, NHL 2K2’s release date had been pushed back literally dozens of times, inciting rumours that it would in fact never see the light of day. The reason for the delays - the same reason why the Sega Sports NHL title skipped a year between 2K and 2K2 - were the movement of the project into a different set of hands. Treyarch, the company also responsible for several different Spiderman incarnations, was handed the reigns to the Sega Sports NHL franchise and told to do with it what they could. What they could happened to be an almost entire revamping of the first NHL game’s code, with a newfound emphasis on pure, unadulterated gameplay. I’ve never played NHL 2K, but there are a number of conflicting opinions of it that I’ve heard. Among the biggest complaint about the game was the lacklustre artificial intelligence that designers made up for with literally impenetrable goaltenders.

Treyarch did their best to fix these problems, of which there must have been many, with the end result being a release that came over six months after the actual 2001-2002 NHL season began. The plus side to that late release, I suppose, is that rosters and entire team line matchings were totally up-to-date as of the end of January 2002 (which, a pessimist might say, all went down the drain at the trade deadline, where teams dumped and picked up whatever they possibly could). Many, in fact, wonder why the NHL 2K2 project hadn’t been dropped altogether in favour of a 2003 incarnation for all of the major gaming systems.

Whatever the case, we can’t really change history, and besides, I was salivating over the prospect of the game well before it’s release, going so far as to pre-order it from the Internet for a ridiculously large sum. Of course, it was quite awhile before I saw the game anyway, but that’s beside the point.

The principal idea behind NHL 2K2, I believe, was in creating an ice hockey game that made pure gameplay its focus. Treyarch really wanted to earn the respect of the hardcore hockey fan market, and they truly succeeded with their game. Whereas Electronic Arts’ NHL series was and still is primarily focused more on bells and whistles than true-to-life gameplay, Treyarch eschewed those same bells and whistles in favour of a more simplistic game whose primary concern is realistic gameplay for the discerning hockey fans who lost faith in EA Sports sometime after NHL 95. I remember some of the great EA hockey games during the heyday of the Sega Genesis where the game was realistic, fun, and challenging, but somewhere along the way they got lost. Perhaps it was emerging technology that screwed them up, but at some point they became more concerned with creating an arcade game with lots of scoring and unrealistic hits and strategies, with all sorts of bells and whistles that distracted gamers from what was a rather pathetic attempt at recreating the atmosphere of a professional hockey game. Sure, the graphics were impressive and the game was fun to an extent, but it got old quick. Far too often I recall shelling out eighty bucks for an EA NHL game and then mastering it by the end of the next week, being able to win 17-3 on the hardest difficulty level. I became disenchanted with EA Sports mission, and vowed never to purchase a hockey game from them again. In this reviewer’s opinion, NHL 2K2 is a game designed to recruit those disenchanted with EA and give them a true, realistic alternative to the other hockey games on the market. It’s for this reason that I love NHL 2K2 - despite the flaws it may still have - and am confident that it is one of the finest sports video games of the Dreamcast era.

NHL 2K2 has essentially all of the standard game modes of any next generation sports game. With a menu modelled after all of the other Sega Sports game, 2K2 offers a quick start mode where you can start a random game with a computer selecting teams and an exhibition mode where you can go either head-to-head with a couple of friends or against the computer, or just screw around with different ideas (something I find myself doing often). There is a tournament mode that can feature as many as 16 teams, a season mode for playing out either a full 82-game schedule (or a half-schedule, whichever you choose), and a playoff mode in which the computer simulates a full season and allows you to pick any of the sixteen seeds, riding them to victory. The game contains all of the NHL teams, along with all-star teams and a number of international teams, including a few that you probably wouldn’t expect to see. The game is NHLPA approved, and the rosters were totally updated for the midpoint of the 2001-02 season.

There is a rather basic create-a-player mode that allows perhaps a little too much leeway as you can use as many points as you wish, and then of course there is the options menu which allows you to alter different facets of the game. You can adjust the number of penalties called, the frequency of fights, as well as turn on and off line changes, manual goalies, and coaching strategies (which I’ll get to later). You can select either five, ten or twenty minute periods (a twenty minute timer runs accordingly with the number that you selected), and choose the number of games necessary for a playoff or tournament series. There are more standard options, such as turning off the trade deadline during a season, and the most interesting option that the game features is that it allows you to select whether the computer uses the North America vs. The World or Eastern Conference vs. Western Conference teams for the all-star game in a season. The big disappointment of game modes is the lack of a franchise mode, one of the few big drawbacks to the game. It’s unfortunate that you can’t follow a team for more than one consecutive year, but it’s also understandable due to the restrictions and the conditions under which the developers worked. Simply put, there really was no time to include a franchise mode, and no franchise mode is better than one filled with glitches and glaring flaws.

When you start up a game, in whatever mode it may be, the first thing that will strike you is the graphics during the opening cut scene before games. Considering the limitations of the Sega Dreamcast and the stress under which the game was designed (not to mention the high level of graphical content of other hockey games for the other three next-generation consoles), the graphics are actually quite impressive. Each NHL arena is accurately portrayed, down to some of the smallest details. The painting at centre ice in each arena is consistent with that in real life (at the time, anyway), and the size and placement of the jumbo screen is accurate. Air Canada Centre comes complete with the Air Canada leaf hovering underneath the scoreboard, and Skyreach Centre in Edmonton features the large Oilers Logo above centre ice. The boards are filled with standard advertisements and logos, although there are much fewer here than there are in real life. Games begin with a fireworks display that is quite vivid, followed by the introductions of the starting line-up for both teams. The players skate in circles and stretch as they’re being announced as lasers circle the ice surface.

Once the introductions are complete, the announcers make a comment about a couple of players and their abilities, and then we get down to the nitty-gritty. The player models are very realistic in and of themselves. Although there are only a few body types, height differences are noticeable, and most of the players bear a marginally accurate resemblance to their real-life counterparts. Jerseys have wrinkles in them and sway just a little, and the skates and helmets reflect the arena lighting with incredible detail. Regrettably, the developers faltered not in the graphics, but in the actual jerseys and dress. The Atlanta Thrashers have an incorrect away uniform in the game, and the Calgary Flames wear the wrong colour helmet for home games (black rather than white). Still, these are relatively small transgressions and can be forgiven.

Goaltenders are much more accurate to real life than in other games, bearing proper padding. They don’t come complete with actual goalie’s helmets (i.e. Cloutier wears a standard mask rather than the cage), but again, it’s forgivable considering the effort necessary to gain permission to use a number of the copyrighted mask images. The ice surface shines brightly at the beginning of periods, reflecting much of the lights and making parts of the arena visible, but it gradually fades before the period ends, complete with scratches and inconsistencies in the ice. The coaches pace the benches endlessly and in accurate detail, but without the permission of coaches, Treyarch was unable to use their likeness, resulting in generic coaches in identical brown or black suits that scream at their team. Replays are another display of graphical prowess, complete with a net-cam that actually looks rather cool, and a penalty-box camera that shows a player squirming in anticipation, waiting to be freed.

It looks nice, yeah, but how does it play? Well, actually, that’s where NHL 2K2 sets itself apart from other hockey “simulations” on the market. Unlike the EA NHL series, NHL 2K2 truly is a simulation. The physics of player movement are realistic, and they skate at a speed about consistent with real life. More impressive are the puck physics, which are true-to-life for the first time ever in a hockey game. EA Sports used puck physics based on a two-dimensional puck, but Treyarch went all out in using a three-dimensional puck model to determine movement. That means that the puck can bounce off of your player’s stick, or careen upwards after hitting something. You may not be able to get all of a slapshot on a rolling puck. And again, there’s a large improvement in AI. The computer will use traditional methods to get you off the puck or circle the puck during a power play in attempt to get a good chance. It will dump the puck on penalty kills and usually knows exactly where it should be. It plays the body and wrestles you off the puck, and even your own team is much better. They’ll automatically go to the net to create traffic or recover rebounds. The goaltenders themselves are quite impressive. While not as impenetrable as those in NHL 2K, the goalies here are smart and difficult to beat on anything other than a near perfect set-up or unpredictable manoeuvre. They all play the angle, and rarely get caught out of position, with the defence AI sometimes chipping in to recover what would otherwise be a goal. They’ll reach for rebounds and come up with big saves. They’ll flop when they’re out of position, just like real goaltenders. All of this great AI really means one thing - an accurate representation of hockey where goals are nearly as hard to come by as they are in real life. Scoring requires some measure of strategy and thought process. Very rarely can you throw the puck on net and score on a professional level goaltender. The only problems I have here are the face-offs. Due to a glitch, a face-off after a penalty will always occur at centre ice, which is understandably frustrating, and what’s especially fun is that the computer can’t give you another penalty if you already have two men in the box no matter what. This means that you can skate around and do whatever you want when you’re down two men, which is actually kind of fun.

What you as a player can do yourself is an indication on its own of the strength of gameplay in NHL 2K2. The game is the first sports game ever to feature two different control types, a basic mode and an advanced mode. The basic mode allows you to do all of the standard hockey tasks by combining two basic moves to one button. B for example, serves a dual function as speed burst and body check, while X can either deliver a poke check or hook an opposing player when you don’t have the puck. If you have the puck, Y serves as a generic deke or a dump if you’re in the defensive zone, X shoots the puck and A passes it (there are also different controls for offense without puck possession). The Advanced control mode is revolutionary because it allows to do a lot of tasks previously thought to be impossible in hockey video games. Pressing a single button does a single task, but holding the left trigger while pressing the same button does an entirely different one. Although this system is rather counter-intuitive at first, it eventually becomes second nature and allows you to decide which type of shot or pass you wish to use, and which type of defensive manoeuvres to pull rather than the computer deciding for you. I rarely control goaltenders, but goaltender controls are similar and very easy to use, even though a computer controlled goalie will always do a better job.

NHL 2K2, even without the advanced controls, allows you to do things other games wouldn’t. You can pin players against the boards and fight for a puck, you can grab a hold of someone and use their momentum, and you can hit someone realistically. In fact, the bodychecking, despite the lack of super-powerful hits that other games have, is still one of the best aspects of the game. There’s nothing quite like delivering a stiff shoulder into the boards and watching a guy crunch up against them, or plastering a guy right in open ice and watching him do an almost complete flip in mid air (three cheers for the hip check, the greatest single move in ice hockey) before coming down hard.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of NHL 2K2, and the one that guarantees it’s reputation amongst serious hockey fans, is the ability to choose offensive and defensive strategies and change them as you wish during a game. Each stage of the game allows you to choose a different strategy, from breaking out of your zone with the puck, to offensive zone movement, forecheck, and defensive zone format. There are three different formations you can choose for each, and with the help of the directional buttons, you can change them on the fly during the game. Positional play not working? Try overloading the defence with your big forwards. Zone defence allowing to many chances? Just switch and use the box formation. Even power play and penalty kills have their own strategies for the player to decide on. Again, the placement of this option on the controller is rather awkward and counter-intuitive, and I usually forego it in favour of automatic strategy selection, but it’s quite useful for the type of person concerned wit strategy - especially since it’s quite helpful for scoring and defending.

The sound department is really the only place where NHL 2K2 falters all that seriously. The game sounds themselves are pretty much dead on with the sound of skates and boards shimmering after a heavy check, along with the sound of shots and so on, but the crowd always sounds so lifeless and unenthused. They cheer and boo during the appropriate times during the introduction, but after that, there’s an almost deathly silence that seems to hang over the crowd once the game begins. They cheer, but never sound all that realistic or enthusiastic about it. The announcers, though, have to be the low point of the game. It’s almost a given that announcers in video games will be terrible, but Sega Sports always surprises you with the quality of play-by-play in their other games. The wisecracks got old, but at least there was variation and accuracy. Not here. For NHL 2K2, a fictional duo teams up to replace Bob Cole and Harry Neale, who did the play-by-play and colour commentary for NHL 2K. It’s a tremendous shame that they didn’t return, because I absolutely love them as announcers for Hockey Night In Canada. Instead, we get two insipid and lifeless characters with play-by-play that is marginally accurate at best. There’s absolutely no inflection in either of their voices, and the repetition of phrases begins all-too soon. The colour commentary guy chimes in at the most inopportune of times with historical tidbits about a team that don’t really mean anything, and sound stupid to boot. But in spite their incessant yammering, I still find it difficult to say anything all that bad about NHL 2K2. You can always hit the mute button and put on some music, I suppose.

NHL 2K2 was, at the time of its release, the pinnacle of hockey simulation. They set a standard that the next Sega Sports NHL games have followed effectively and accurately since then, establishing that true hockey fans need no longer search for the elusive holy grail of video game hockey simulation. And while the NHL 2K3 games made a number of improvements, they have failed to make NHL 2K2 obsolete. It will still provide fun for hockey fans for several years to come, in spite of the few flaws it may have. Had the game been developed for another month or so rather than being rushed to release, I suspect that those flaws would have been minimized and the game would have been that much better - but even still, NHL 2K2 represents a remarkable step forward for hockey video gaming.

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