Superstar Ice Hockey

Superstar Ice Hockey brings the rough-and-tumble world of hockey to the computer with a distinctly old-school approach. Released in 1987, it focuses on the essentials: skating, passing, shooting, checking, and trying not to spend the entire match chasing the puck while your opponents score. The presentation is simple, but the gameplay has a certain immediacy that makes it easy to understand and surprisingly entertaining. Matches can become hectic affairs, particularly when everyone is fighting for possession and the screen suddenly seems much smaller than it did thirty seconds earlier. There is no need for elaborate management systems or complicated statistics here; this is hockey boiled down to its basic ingredients. Superstar Ice Hockey may look primitive compared with modern sports games, but it has the straightforward charm of an era when the important question was simply whether you could score more goals than the other team.