Every Christmas since I was knee high to a grasshopper, Uncle Paul has slid me a crisp $50 bill, fresh from the teller.
This year, I know exactly where that gift money will be going.
Old Time Hockey is the video game us old-timey button-mashers have been unknowingly waiting for.
Inspired by arcade classics like Techmo Bowl, NBA Jam and Blades of Steel — as well as the cult film Slap Shot — V7 Entertainment favoured fun over realism and violence over graphics when creating Old Time Hockey, which is not endorsed by the NHL and is available early in 2017.
Anything that uses Stompin’ Tom Connors for its trailer already has a leg up on being awesome:
“We wanted to try to capture that experience of, you know, playing on the couch, having a few drinks with your buddies, that whole old-school nostalgic experience,” executive producer Mike Torillo told Polygon.
“We wanted to also have a good emphasis on all the stuff that you usually don’t get to see, you know — the dirtier side of hockey.”
So the players in Old Time Hockey‘s perfectly named Bush League don’t wear helmets, sport unruly moustaches, get rewarded for Gordie Howe hat tricks, and are prone bench-clearing brawls.
There will be donnybrooks.
Even better: The players are manipulated by NHL 94–style controls. Perfect for us stuck-in-the-’90s gamers with no time or patience to figure out six-button combinations and triple-joystick dangles and line juggling on fly.
Oh, and there is also a “beer mode” in which you play with only one hand on the controller.
The game will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam. It’s rated 16-plus on account of dudes getting whacked with lumber.
“We recognized that there’s holes in the market, so to speak — there’s gaps for these niches to fit into, and we feel that it’s an under-served genre,” said Torillo, who’s still a fan of EA’s market-dominating simulation series. “But we understand that, yeah, [EA’s] NHL [franchise] has to have a squeaky-clean, good representation of the sport.
“So we wanted to almost do everything you can’t do in an NHL game.”
