The SNES version of NHLPA Hockey ’93 was developed by Park Place Productions and published by EA Sports in 1992 in North America and 1993 in Europe. It was originally made for the Sega Mega Drive earlier in 1992 before being ported to the SNES. It is the second game in the EA Sports NHL series, but the first one to be released for the Super Nintendo. The game doesn’t have the NHL license however, since the NHL withdrew their license because the original NHL Hockey game included fighting. So the teams are only referred to by their cities, and not the team names or team logos themselves. It does however have the NHLPA license, meaning that it includes real player names.
This is a game my brother had as I was growing up, but I didn’t particularly like it back then. First of all, I wasn’t really a big hockey fan back then, and second, I just felt that this game didn’t play that well compared to something like International Superstar Soccer. It wasn’t really until my brother got me a burned copy of NHL 2002 for the PC that I got more into hockey games, but always when I tried to play this game I just couldn’t enjoy it and just got bored after one match. So returning to it will certainly be interesting.
So, this is a hockey game all right. There’s no real team names, only the names of the cities, but there’s real player names and the colours of the jerseys are correct as far as I know. There’s a few different game modes, like an exhibition match, play a best of 7 matches, as well as a tournament mode. While the Sega version had a save function, the SNES port uses passwords. So far so good.
But, the first thing I notice is how choppy this game plays. It feels like a slideshow and almost made me feel sick. Gameplay wise, this is an awful port of the Sega version. It’s like playing the game in slow motion. The controls are good, but seriously, I couldn’t play more than a few games before just not bothering with this one anymore due to the choppiness and how sluggish this game plays.
Graphically, the game looks decent enough. It looks pretty much identical to the Sega version. The sound effects are nice, and were always a bit amusing to me. Like the players going “Uhh” when they are tackled, and the organ music playing during the face offs. Speaking of music, the menu music is awesome, but I realized that it’s the same soundtrack as the original NHL Hockey for the Sega Mega Drive, just with a SNES sound to it. It sounds a bit softer compared to the harsher sounding Sega equivalent.
Overall, this is a really bad port of the Sega original. The good music, graphics and sound might redeem it slightly, but the choppy, sluggish gameplay simply ruins it for me. It was painful enough just playing a few games and I could never imagine playing through a whole tournament like this. It’s just unacceptable today and it shouldn’t even have been acceptable in 1992. The only reason I could see that the SNES version got so good review back in the day would be the lack of good hockey games on the console at the time. But now, this is just bad.
Is it worth Playing?
Avoid this one, there’s literally no reason to play it today. If you want a hockey game for the SNES, go with NHL ’94, or perhaps any of the later NHL games from ’95 to ’98, since they are supposedly much better than this. If you really want to play NHLPA ’93 for some reason, such as the fact that it has fighting, you should play the Sega version since it just plays so much better. Avoid this rushed, bad port.
Final score: 3/10
Screenshots via MobyGames: http://www.mobygames.com
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