The Stanley Cup Playoffs kicked off a week ago, so why not a better time to talk some retro hockey? Unlike many other genres, in the ever evolving medium that is video games, sports titles age rapidly and are awkward to go back and revisit, but I find hockey titles fun to mess around with from almost any era. NHL All-Star Hockey (later becoming the NHL 2K series) continues the line of the Sega Sports series that gave EA Sports games a run for their money. The first venture onto the new platform was a bit of a mixed bag. This game has ambitious presentation, but a lateral move from previous entries.

Leaping from the Sega Genesis to the Saturn, the notable difference would be augmenting visuals. The arenas in All-Star Hockey are 3D rendered while the players and referee are digitized two-dimensional sprites with various animations that give off the appearance of 3D. It's a look that doesn't look flattering today, you can barely tell which teams are which. Sure, one of those teams above could clearly be the Detroit Red Wings, but without prior knowledge of knowing that's the New Jersey Devils, it could be a series of guesses.

There's even a brief pause where the players will stand for 1/5th of the national anthem. Surely, you aren't expecting for intricate rendering of video game crowds when you're in 1995, I think simply the novelty of 3D environments is impressive enough on its own to captivate the imagination. I'd like to take this opportunity to say, whenever I see memes about "Oh, well back then, it was all about gameplay. Graphics didn't matter!", we were bragging about stadium attendees resembling that fuzzy dust lining padded envelopes.

Graphical enhancements and presentation aside (they added a digitized Marv Albert, but he doesn't call the play-by-play) this version of NHL All-Star Hockey doesn't play as fast or smooth as the more fleeting Genesis games. It's a little bit of a slog and the swoopy camera can be rather annoying. It doesn't help that the load times are incredibly long. In the age before collision detection, checking was less momentum based and more like watching two toddlers running full speed and colliding with each other. Most slap shots will blow by the best goalies and the score can run up really fast.

The first All-Star Hockey game has some cool trivia and tries a lot of things, but gameplay-wise is a tad bit light years behind other hockey titles around the time. I do miss when the music was produced in-house rather than relying on third party music from bands, but hey, this game DID have "I Got The Power" from the band SNAP. They nearly play the whole song. Hey, if you pay for rights, get that money's worth!