Visual Concepts

Game Description: ESPN NHL Hockey emphasizes ESPN style of presentation to make you experience reality. The visuals and audio feature the same music cues, overlays, box scores, and other distinctive elements that help set ESPN apart from other networks sports coverage. ESPN NHL Hockey brings you authentic box scores, overlays, stats and more fully capturing the atmosphere of an ESPN NHL broadcast; Pushing the hardware to new limits, player models and faces, environmental effects, arenas, cut scenes, uniforms and more are meticulously detailed raising realism to a new level; Manage all aspects of your franchise from key trades to scouting talent in the minors and abroad with an easy to navigate 3D front office menu system.

Hockey is a game of speed, finesse, grit and grind. Injury is commonplace, and the ability to shirk pain is viewed as a right of passage. Yet where actual players incur very real bumps and gashes, the pain I experienced while playing ESPN NHL Hockey was strictly metaphorical—a bruised ego.

In sports games, there is a clear split between two different groups. One group of games does their best to simulate a sport, whereas the other group takes the sport and changes it in an obvious manner. This latter group is widely referred to as the arcade-style sports games, and Sega Soccer Slam definitely falls into this category, and for the most part it works. By using fewer players, Sega allows for greater detail being attached to each player, as well as other numerous touches, including almost entirely polygonal crowdsa very welcome sight in a sports game.

Soccer never caught much popularity in the U.S. We tried to like it. During the short span of a few months in the early 1990s, soccer fever hit the States, complete with a McDonald's endorsement. But it proved to be just another passing fad. America went on, largely ignoring the sport.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Mild Violence

When I first played last year's NFL 2K, I was, to put it lightly, amazed. The play-by-play was great, and the action was both fast and cerebral. The game breathed new life into the stale video-football genre, setting a standard that has yet to be equaled. Now comes its sequel, NFL 2K1, and it is everything anyone could ask for, and then some.

NFL 2K1 is just the cure for the football fan who is tired of the same old NFL videogames. Here we have a football franchise that's still growing—still searching for that identity, which so instrumental in determining a sports game's success. The NFL 2K series alone has that potential to show us new things, visually and otherwise. NFL 2K1 generates excitement by default (it is, after all, a Dreamcast exclusive). Anything on PlayStation and Nintendo 64 should justifiably look stale in comparison.