430 · Wayne Gretzky Hockey

• Endorsed by the greatest name in Hockey

I. Setup & Premise

• The pitch: It's 1991. Wayne Gretzky — the greatest hockey player who ever lived, mid-dynasty, already on the Kings — puts his name on an NES cartridge. The game promises realistic simulation hockey with full coaching options, multiple game speeds, animated refs, and body checks.
• Developed by Bethesda Softworks. Published by THQ. Released January 1991. Read that developer name again. Bethesda Softworks, founded in 1986 by Christopher Weaver in Bethesda, Maryland.
• The same Bethesda that would create The Elder Scrolls. The same Bethesda that would publish Fallout 3, Skyrim, Starfield. Before they were building open-world RPGs that consumed thousands of hours of people's lives, they were making sports sims — and the NES version of Wayne Gretzky Hockey was reputedly coded in a single night.
• Bethesda published the game shortly after Peter Pocklington traded Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings on August 9, 1988. a trade that shook Canada to its core. The PC version came first in 1988 and was well-received. The NES port arrived three years later..

II. What Makes It Notable

• The overhead view and sim ambitions mixed
• The game uses a top-down perspective, unlike any other sports game we’ve seen so far.
• With fewer pixels and a smaller viewport, it creates a zoomed-out, cluttered mess where players are tiny and the puck is even smaller
• Options include multiple game speeds and difficulty levels, a practice mode, and adjustable period lengths.
• On paper, the feature set is deep for an NES sports game. Exhibition, playoffs, full seasons. Penalties, icings, offsides. The problem isn't what the game offers — it's how it plays
• The player-switching catastrophe broken
• If a player on your team gets the puck, the game doesn't auto-switch you to that player. By the time you've mashed Select enough times to cycle through your entire team and switch to the guy that has the puck, he's since shot it into a wall or passed it to the other team.
• Every NES hockey game before this understood that when the puck changes possession, you need to be controlling the player who has it. Ice Hockey does it. Blades of Steel does it. Wayne Gretzky Hockey makes you manually cycle through your roster while the AI drives your puck carrier into the boards.
• The AI broken
• The AI is so stupid it's staggering. Your computer-controlled teammates don't play hockey
• They don't position themselves for passes, they don't support offensive rushes, they don't defend with any awareness.
• Combined with the player-switching problem, you're essentially fighting your own team as much as the opponent
• The NES flickering feels dated
• The NES flickering can make it especially hard to parse what's going on when the players on both teams scramble for the puck all at once.
• With ten skaters plus goalies on a small NES screen in a top-down view, sprite flickering is constant. The puck disappears into pileups. Players blink in and out of existence.
• The cartridge variants collector note
• The game exists in at least three cartridge label variants: a black Kings jersey version, a white Kings jersey version, and a white jersey with no THQ logo. The white jersey variant is notably rarer and commands higher prices in the collector market. Same game on all of them — the only difference is which Gretzky you see on the label. It's a minor curiosity, but for NES collectors it's one of the more interesting variant stories in the library

III. Pop Culture, Legacy & Connections

• Bethesda's origin story:
• Bethesda is credited with the creation of the first physics-based sports simulation, Gridiron!, in 1986.
• Electronic Arts was working on the first John Madden Football and hired Bethesda to help finish developing it.
• The next year, Bethesda sued EA for $7.3 million, claiming EA halted the release of Gridiron! while incorporating many of its elements into Madden. The case was resolved out of court.
• Konami used a Wayne Gretzky–Thomas Jonsson photo from the 1983 Stanley Cup Finals as the basis for the Blades of Steel box art. Altering the likenesses and uniforms. So even on the game that wasn't named after him, Gretzky's image was selling hockey. The man was unavoidable. He was the sport

IV. Closing Bits

• Tease next episode

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

00:00 Wayne Gretzky Hockey, endorsed by the greatest name in hockey.

00:20 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. Joe knows absolutely nothing about hockey, so it wasn't worth having him on this episode.

00:38 You know, I would defend him here, but we're no longer on speaking terms. Right. So, you know a lot about hockey. Your team, the Buffalo Sabres, currently, as of the recording, is in the playoffs. As of this recording. I hope they're still in the playoffs. Yeah. They are currently at this very moment in game two, leading 1-0 in the series against the Boston Bruins. But that could change at any moment.

01:08 So, I'm doing my best to think about the podcast and not hockey. Now, what's crazy though, Sean, is that we record a few weeks in advance and everything, but the NHL playoffs are so long that they're still going to be going on when this episode airs. Of course. It's entirely possible that they have been long eliminated by the time that this airs, but there's still a lot of hockey to go. But just, you know, cut me some slack. It's been probably 15 years since this team has been relevant and I don't know what to do with my hands.

01:43 And that's, you know, that's 2026 Buffalo Sabres. And we're not going to talk about, well, maybe we should, like 1991 Buffalo Sabres. Were they a good team? Any idea what was going on for the Buffalo Sabres? The Buffalo Sabres were good for almost their entire existence until 2011.

02:02 And like, they were like the top five winningest franchises up until the drought. And it's definitely a fall from grace. Like you had a lot of great players on those 90s teams. And I wasn't really aware back then, but it's still part of the history. And what's funny about this game is if you open up the manual, you'll see a screenshot of this game in which you are playing as the Los Angeles Kings against the Buffalo Sabres. But in this game, you cannot play as the Buffalo Sabres. You can barely play as half the teams. What the hell's going on? Where are the teams? It's very strange.

02:52 What is that? I couldn't even figure out a rhyme or reason to like who they include and didn't include. But I imagine since they do have players, then it must have been like about getting, being able to get all the rights. They got Randy Burge, Mario Lemieux, even fucking Mike McDonald.

03:09 Maybe they just couldn't get like, you know, because the Rangers aren't here either. So it's like maybe they just couldn't get enough of the players on the team at the time. But the NFL, it's not the NFL. The NHLPA was a thing. Right. Not sure what's happening here. And I don't know how to explain it because it is just such a rant. Like we're used to games where it's like, no, no NHL players in the game. Right. It's just like made up teams or just city names. But this one is doing like a really weird balance and not and not balancing at all. If I'm being honest, it's falling over itself.

03:43 Of course, it's named after the great one and Wayne Gretzky himself. I don't. One thing I don't understand is why they named this game after the like the that one time coach of the Phoenix Coyotes. But you can get into that if you want. Well, I was going to get into that because I don't think we need to.

04:03 I don't think we need to explain anybody why Wayne Gretzky is great. And we probably I'd probably do a pretty bad job. But in terms of like the goat conversations of their respective sports. Right. The Michael Jordan, the Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky. I suppose at the time of Wayne Gretzky, you would have had like Ken Griffey as like the best in baseball. But the Wayne Gretzky stat lines are really the one.

04:30 Yeah. Just like make it so obvious. Like, yeah, he actually is the goat. Like it's not true. The true definition is the platonic ideal of dominance. Right. It's just it's actually insane. And I remember like, you know, when I was watching hockey as a kid, Wayne Gretzky was on the Rangers. So that was exciting and everything. But like, I didn't really appreciate what was going on until years later.

04:55 That crazy stat about how if you took every goal that Wayne Gretzky ever scored away from him, he would still be the all time points leader. Yeah. That's like, that's just not a it's not a fathomable stat. It's no one can understand that. There's too much parody. I mean, you know, if you think of parody as like a team thing and just like distributing talent. But the guy was like if it's just too much like it'd be it's beyond reason. So obviously, even in 1991, Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player.

05:31 He's he's already had a successful stint with the Oilers. And at this point, he's already on the Kings. The trade has already happened. The trade. Yeah, the trade. The only trade that ever happened in the history of the NHL. And now Wayne Gretzky is putting his name on a on a video game. And the game promises realistic simulation hockey with multiple game speeds, animated refs, body checks, you name it. And it's all developed by Bethesda Softworks.

06:06 The same Bethesda that will create the Elder Scrolls. This is one of the weirdest like, wait, they did this I've ever seen. Like, did they do Wayne Gretzky's 3D hockey? You know, I was I was supposed to look into that. And I'm pretty sure the answer is no. Because that's one of your favorite games, isn't it? Right. Well, I will admit, I will admit that that game is bad. But yes, it is. It is definitely a game I loved. And no, Midway Games takes over by that. And Midway, you know, they do great stuff with sports games. Of course, yes. So I'm forgiven for my sins.

06:44 But, you know, Bethesda. Oh, and published by THQ, by the way, who we mentioned. What game was that? Was that Peter Pan and the Pirates? Yeah. Peter Pan and the Pirates was THQ's first game. Wow. That we saw on the NES. So we're getting another one real quick here with Wayne Gretzky hockey. So you have Bethesda and you have THQ.

07:09 And, you know, I was looking into like, what can I say about Bethesda other than the whole like, you know, the people who created Fallout 3, Skyrim, Starfield, you know, the open world thing that we now turn into a meme, horse armor and all that stuff. Uh-huh. What could I say? And I just want to say that like, this is news to me because I don't live in Maryland, but they're called Bethesda because they were based out of Bethesda, Maryland. That is true.

07:34 And that just doesn't feel, doesn't feel as fun as like what Bethesda like sparks into my brain. Like, I don't think of like a town. I think of like, I don't know. I only know that because they put, um, they put their bombed out studio office into Fallout 3. Oh, that's awesome. Because it's very close to DC. So I thought that was funny. Yeah, that's really cool. That's the only reason I know that though.

08:00 And, uh, it's worth noting that, uh, they were making sports sims or sports games and really not simulators, um, for a, uh, a good while at the beginning here. And, uh, this NES version of Wayne Gretzky hockey, uh, was reportedly coded in a single night and you'd know it.

08:22 See, what I was going to say is like, I can almost see it. I can almost see what they mean by this, like how accurate things were going to be with this game. And it just, it just couldn't get there in terms of hardware.

08:40 Like, do you, do you know what I mean? Like, it almost feels like it, there's a bunch of systems that almost work in this game. I agree with you. There's a, there's a plan and, and then they should have played their own game for shipping it because they would have known that the plan didn't work. And I think first and foremost, it's all about the overhead view. The game uses a completely top-down perspective, not some cool, like 45 degree angle thing. Not, not, not like some side scrolling thing. It uses a complete top-down perspective. Unlike any other sports game we've seen so far.

09:17 And, you know, being that far out, like with, with fewer pixels and a smaller viewport, it creates a zoomed out cluttered mess where players are really tiny. And the puck is even smaller than them. And it makes it really hard to read what the hell is even going on here. It's so strange though. And I'm not even talking about like legibility here. I'm just talking about fidelity. Like we have seen some good stuff happen with football, with basketball, with soccer, with baseball.

09:52 And like, this is, this looks like a, like a five-year-old game at this point. Yes. And I think it's specifically because of just how bare minimum the players are represented. Like, I think we are just used to, in, in, in the hockey games we've seen, a little more legibility into what's going on. And here it's really just like the sticks, you know, it's like, it's like some, some kind of like thin bodies. Or, or wide bodies, depending on which way you have your character facing.

10:24 And then just these like, just these single stick lines that are like everything that matters in terms of how you shoot and how you, you know, try to steal. And it's really strange because it just, it feels, it feels so weird to have games like ice hockey on the NES already. Like laying out the blueprint so far in advance and then getting this and being like, oh, here's something different. And it's like, yeah, it's, there's a reason the other ones didn't do this.

10:56 Yeah. So to get into what it feels like they're trying to do and to give them a little bit of grace here. Like the, the teams find their position. Like you can, like when you go into the offensive zone and they almost get into like an attack formation, the, the face offs are correct. Um, the transitions, you can kind of like, they make sure they don't go off sides and really you're the only one that can force an offsides.

11:31 Um, there's like a lot of stuff that looks like AI working correctly until you actually try and play it. And that's if you can, uh, play it, of course, to overcome the crazy, I mean, they just keep finding new ways to impress me, Sean. The menu system in this game, uh, is just another, it's, it's not Sesame Street. It's a whole new way of trying to break my brain. Oh, the starts and the A's.

12:00 Yes. And so, and so like, it's worth mentioning that as soon as you start up the game, you're just greeted with a black screen with blue text, just listing off a bunch of people who worked on the game and all that legal stuff. And it's like, all right, you're forgiven. Then you get this kind of like cool little hockey thing for a second. And then you just go right into like, there's no cool, like pixel art version of Wayne Gretzky or anything. It's just the menu.

12:22 What do you mean? That's supposed to be him. He skates to center ice and like, you know, he doesn't have a face, but that's supposed to be Wayne Gretzky. I'm talking about after that cool scene. Oh, okay. You then just go to like a menu system of just like, all right, you know, like we got to get through this computer. You're garbage before you can get into this. Right. Exactly. And, and, and then it has all these different things, player options and the player options, one player, two player, two players as a team or computers only. If you want to watch, remember that feature.

12:55 And the, the arrows next to one player, there's two of them on each side and they are highlighted yellow. And then there's arrows next to all the other things, but they're grayed out. And if you just press the start button thinking that you're selecting one player, you're actually just agreeing to all of the prompts and the game begins. If you, if you try to cycle through with like the select button, you will be cycling through the options themselves, player options, period lanes, game speed, and game type. If you want to change any of those things, you press the A button to move down in the list from one player to two player to two player team to computer only.

13:35 Thankfully, it won't then just go down to five minutes, 10 minutes. You have to, again, press the select button to move that stuff. But it is just like, it's just too thought out of a menu here, guys. And it just spells like it's going to, you know, it's a bad omen.

13:50 See, I, I kind of expected this because what I had read about this game was that not only was it like a sports action game, but you could also like just, just do the, like the coaching. Like you could do, you can call plays and all that. And what I didn't realize was that must've just been the, like the PC version of that because this, that does not exist in this game.

14:15 Yeah. And another part of this game that's really tough when you get into it is player switching in general. If a player on your team gets the puck, the game doesn't auto switch you to that player. This is sort of the NBA jam formula, but what they didn't realize is that NBA jam works because there's two players on it. Yeah, right. Exactly. Whereas here, like, I think it, this game almost might have worked if it just would auto switch to the puck holder, the puck handler. And maybe you'd be able to actually set up some plays and some one timers if it just did that, but it just did not do that.

15:02 Yeah. Every NES hockey game before this understood that when the puck changes possession, you need to be controlling the player who has it. Ice hockey did that. Blades of Steel did that. Wayne Gretzky hockey has you mashing select enough times to cycle through your entire team. Hopefully you get lucky and it's just the very next guy, but most times you've got to cycle through a few players to switch to the guy that has the puck.

15:26 And by the time that you get to him. Yeah, he's probably shot it, right? Yeah. Or he's drifted off sides and you've got to, you have to reenter. Um, it's, it's so, it's so silly. Like, even if they just had, if you could shout commands, like you can, you can force your teammates to pass to you, but you can't force your teammates to shoot.

15:50 Which really removes any kind of, uh, strategizing that if they, if they were, if they were really focused on making this scheme work, they would at least need to have that button.

16:05 Yeah. And, and keep in mind too, it would be okay. Right. If the AI was like somewhat competent that like, okay, well, even though I'm not controlling this player right now, they're still going to play hockey. Right. It's like, they're not playing hockey. I don't know where, I don't know where their heads are, but they're not, they're not understanding the fundamentals of hockey because they don't position themselves for passes. You know, like if you have possession, they're not like setting up formations or anything. They're, they're literally just kind of drifting.

16:32 This is why. In this game. This is why I like, I had to preface this with like, it's almost like they, they kind of did it because the, there are, there is some positioning. Like when the puck gets thrown like against the boards and it's sort of, it's now coming up on the other side towards the defense. Like you see the defense pinch, like they pinch and they try and stop the puck from exiting the offensive zone. And what would happen in any other circumstance is that that player or that computer player would then now possess the puck.

17:09 What happens here is that they just get close, but never grab the puck. And so they're, they're, they're, they're almost like kind of pantomiming hockey. And unless you're actually interacting with it, no hockey actually occurs.

17:27 Whoever has control of the puck starts like flickering between their color of their jersey and, and white. So it's, it looks like it's like that traditional, like NES glitchy flickering, but it's, it's, it's by design to do it that way. But then there's also flickering too. If like too many sprites are lined up in the same way, like there's just that kind of flickering too.

17:51 And you know, that's like, that's a technical problem that I, I guess I could kind of forgive, but I can't understand why. Like is the flickering supposed to be like Wayne Gretzky's hockey's equivalent to like the highlighter puck from the NHL broadcasts? Like I, I, I think that there were very limited ways to indicate who the puck holder is or who you're controlling. So I can forgive this in its entirety. Um, but that that's the least of its worries.

18:22 Yeah. I mean, it's, it's 10 skaters on the ice plus the goalies and the weirdest thing that you can do, which I couldn't believe it. It was the first thing I had to do in the game, which was a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a bad thing for me to do. Cause I should have learned how to play the game first before just seeing how far I could break it. But you can pick to be, um, the Los Angeles Kings and then have your opponent be the Los Angeles Kings as well. And so everybody's just wearing white jerseys and it's like, there's no way to tell who's on whose team or whatever. That's pretty awesome. Actually.

18:51 Yeah. It's just a big blobby mess. It looks like, uh, it looks like it's 10 V, uh, or 11 V one, uh, out there on the ice. But, um, but you know, if you do play it, presume, you know, like with, with the teams not being the same, the only way to tell is, is just the color of the jerseys, which is a very simple, like whole.

19:12 Yeah. You know, fill in of just like this color, like you're all blue, you're all pink. Like, okay. And then all the colors are just sort of close enough to the team that they're trying to emulate. Um, I have a couple other major head scratcher decisions that are, are, are less insane as not having, uh, you can automatically control the puck handler. Um, one is only slightly less damning, which is that pass and shoot are the same button. And it's entirely based on the direction that you're holding. Uh, if you are kind of shooting, if you're, if you're kind of moving the puck towards the net, you will shoot. Otherwise you will pass. Um, it's, it's a very strange decision.

20:00 And, um, then the other one is more so like just graphic design. Uh, the, the HUD or like just the info on the screen telling you the score and time left in the period is not like a superimposed sort of graphic it is baked into the screen so you will have to if you want to know the um the score how many goals your opponent has scored so far you will have to go towards the right side of the rink well just like the players on the real ice right don't they have to look up at the jumbotron to figure out how much time's left and stuff you know i did think it's like oh it's like oh they're just doing like physical everything's physical but like no that's that's that's giving them too much credit i think

21:01 and you know this isn't you're giving up good you're bringing up good points about the actual game uh i'm looking for uh ways to continue to talk about uh things other than the mechanics so uh i want to put a note in here about uh for the collectors out there there are three different versions of this cartridge uh one with wayne gretzky having a black king's jersey one with him having a white king's jersey and another one where he wears the white jersey but with no thq logo and that that variant

21:33 is notably rarer and commands higher prices in the collector's market so i feel like that's one of ones that like you might not even know you have it right because you just think you have a copy of wayne gretzky's hockey but like if you do own a copy go check which version you have you might have the white version with the no thq logo and not even know it how much is that much uh how much more is that worth i'm gonna look that up while we talk because i do have another note about just collector

21:57 things in general on the nes a weird thing that like you don't see elsewhere is that uh nes cartridges also have like three screw versus five screw um god right no no yeah it's really weird and like the five screw ones uh command i think like a higher pre it's one or the other like one commands like a significantly higher premium it's not just considered like a variant it's like oh no this one just doesn't

22:22 exist that much so it's like hundreds of dollars more than the other one and like that kind of collecting is where i think i draw that's where i draw the line that's dumb i'm just gonna say it's dumb uh i don't agree with it it's right because what's stopping me from just trying to find a cheaper game with five screws and put it in that am i crazy can i just remove some screws like wait is the one with more screws more valuable or less screws uh you're gonna make me look now aren't you

22:53 don't look don't look the people need to know hold on hold on or you just add screws and maybe five screw four five screw is is more rare remember that game gotcha the sport the paintball game oh yes okay that's a three hundred thousand dollar game with five screws five screw it's fifteen hundred dollars but still it's probably like it's probably like a ten dollar game if it's three screw you know

23:16 it's like it's like how does that who's deciding uh wayne gritsky hockey um black black jersey eight dollars white jersey twenty three dollars white jersey no thq logo fifty dollars that's kind of a big deal uh i'm i'm at least going to grant that is within a reasonable amount of dollars that someone might part with to buy a video game so i'm not going to hear that one

23:47 okay now wayne gritsky number 32 so he's in the oilers uniform funko pop how much you think that is i don't even want to guess is it is it 350 dollars you you know the funko market is dead

24:01 oh is it yeah i wouldn't know that well sorry i i thought you knew it's just like everybody's trying to like offload these things now it's like it says it's 23 dollars which is obviously on the low anyway but like you good luck getting 23 dollars for that like the funko market has completely collapsed people i feel like there's i mean like that's still like you can melt that plastic down and and and make like a fidget spinner with it that's worth 23 dollars every fidget spinner is worth 23 dollars they used to charge for them when they were all the rage

24:33 now bethesda is credited with the creation of um the first physics-based sports simulation game a game called gridiron in 1986 uh electric arts uh ea was working on the first john madden football electronic arts i said electric yes i'm just reading so fucking fast i'm just trying to get this episode over i have like a gun to my head and i'm like fucking stop reading uh electronic arts that's why i actually you know i feel like i knew i said it wrong because that's why i said ea yeah let's stick with electric arts

25:06 electric arts was working on the first john maiden football game and they hired bethesda to help finish developing it but the next year bethesda sued ea for 7.3 million dollars claiming ea halted the release of gridiron while incorporating many of its elements into madden the case was resolved out of court i don't i feel like this story doesn't mean much to me like i don't have enough information to make a decision here yeah i agreed to help them make that other game that was your football game

25:36 i'm trying to think of a world in which bethesda makes madden and i it just is not going to compute so i i i i'm disregarding this but man imagine story mode open world madden terrible writing yeah well i mean but we'd be different exactly okay uh blades of steel did we mention this on the blades of steel episode it's been like a decade so i'm just gonna say it again konami used uh a photo of wayne gretzky and uh thomas johnson uh from the 1983 stanley cup finals as the basis for the blades

26:15 of steel box art so they altered their likeliness just enough so that likeliness likeness i'm having a terrible time today it's okay i can't say it's okay but they altered them uh and the uniform so that this way they couldn't be sued so uh it's just worth the reason why i have it here obviously is because even though uh the game wasn't named after him this isn't even wayne gretzky's first appearance

26:36 on the box yeah of an nhl game it's like uh all all your favorite comic book artists such as trace things you know yeah the man was unavoidable he was the sport and we are the podcast and we always do the essential games list sean so yeah so just as an update um the savers are tied zero zero heading into the second period of game two of the first round of the stanley cup playoffs um i i think that this game would be closer to if we were entering the second period losing three nothing entering

27:24 the second period of game two after losing game one uh basically what i'm trying to say is that like this is a really bad hockey game um which is really frustrating because like you can almost see little moments where it's like oh this could have been interesting like it's more about the direction of your your stick that that uh has to do with what kind of shot you produce and if it's going to be saved stuff that you wouldn't see again until uh ea's nhl games entered like uh like the 2010s um

28:01 and it just like it doesn't look good it doesn't have any presentation the presentation is actually worse than you could think of because of how everything's baked into the screen you have to like pan to see anything um there's not a lot to like here uh yes you will see uh refs give actual like penalty sort of pantomimes but other than that there's really nothing going on um not essential and just as an update over here the new york metropolitans are trying to snap an 11 game losing

28:40 streak as of tonight uh before they make it a 12th it is the bottom of the sixth and the mets are winning three to two but when we started recording it was three nothing and uh nolan mclean the starting picture had a no hitter going um which was exciting now all hope is lost and i feel like it's just a matter of time before they lose this game and maybe never win another game of baseball long as i live

29:06 now uh in terms of this game i feel about the same amount of despair watching the mets as i was playing this game this is the first time in a long time where uh and you know listeners i tell you this in confidence i could not play much of this game because i just frankly didn't want to uh oftentimes i will uh play a video game a lot just to you know see enough of it to talk about it confidently on this podcast this was not one of those games uh this was the rare occasion where i hated it so much that i

29:37 just said i don't need to invest this much time i look at the long play on youtube which is 23 minutes and 32 seconds and they probably had me beat by about five minutes or so i really um i really didn't like this one i'm not i'm not trying to be like i'm not saying it's like one of the worst games ever it's just one of these things where it was just like right away i was like nope i've seen better hockey on this uh on this system i don't need this and that happens all the time right like there are

30:05 genres all the time where you first you know like imagine if you first on ps2 get like grand theft auto 3 right it's like a lot of other uh you know of of of that genre the third person shooter adventure game on the ps2 are it's gonna be tough to to adjust backwards right it's like i feel like that's just what happened here with wayne gretzky it's really hard to like play ice hockey and blades of steel and be like yeah sure i'll try this it's like this just doesn't work for good reason i i think they they made the wrong call with the extreme top down view as if you are literally from the jumbotrons pov in the center of the ice it just doesn't work i don't like it

30:47 i do uh like some other versions of wayne gretzky's hockey though so there is hope wayne gretzky's 3d hockey he's a brick wall and then he turns into a brick wall in in wayne gretzky's 3d hockey the goalie that's pretty cool whoa he's also he could go on fire he turned on fire in that boston bruins just scored oh so we should probably stop we should probably stop recording i'm gonna go cry now you like like!