Wayne Gretzky Hockey

Yeouch! I never knew that NES hockey games were ever this bad. And it all starts with the color scheme. All the teams have cream-colored jerseys (light blues, pinks, purples). Combine this with a light blue background & everything starts to blend together. Now since it's hard to see who's who you end up passing the puck to your opponent as opposed to a team-mate. So it becomes a long game of quess who your team-mates are and hope you chose the right one. Talk about extreme frustration! The simplistic gameplay would have been fine enough (there's nothing wrong with good-old arcade style gameplay), but the coloring problem leads to alot of problems that interfere with the game itself. And this simply should not be! I'll give it credit for the nice amount of animation. And this is the first game I ever heard using understandable voices (before the 16-bit era). But the color problem ruins the whole darn thing. Hockey & Wayne Gretzky fans need to look for their kicks else where.

Category Rating How & Why?
Graphics 3 Painfully Small Players / Colors Blur Together too Easily / Some Nice Animation
Music 4 Mostly Soundeffects with the Occasional Theme / Some Actual Voice-Overs on the NES!
Gameplay 4 Decent Line-Up / Control is Fairly Simple & Easy / Since the Colors look the Same it's hard to tell who's on your Team
Innovation 4 There's not much Difference between Most Hockey Games / This one has a Wayne Gretzky license...
Replay 3 Maybe some Gretzky Fans will Enjoy this Old-School Rev / But most Players will get Bored with the Overly Simple Controls or get Frustrated with the Glaring Color Problem

Overall 3.6