"With the pass! With the pass! With the pass!" Expect to hear this in your nightmares for weeks after playing Blades of Steel, Konami's surprisingly chatty NES ice hockey sim. Its voice samples may have been a big selling point back when it was released, but Blades of Steel stands out today as a rare example of a sports game that remains as fun to play now as it was 20 years ago.
Coincidentally, Blades of Steel is also one of the more violent hockey games you'll ever play. Players slam into each other constantly in an attempt to gain control of the puck, and will start fistfights multiple times in a single period. The player who punches the hardest is rewarded, while the weak will collapse with a warbly yelp of digitized pain. Blades of Steel is rough like that.
It's the fast, aggressive play style that makes Blades of Steel so great. Nintendo's own Ice Hockey may technically be more complex and require slightly more gameplay finesse, but there's something to be said about a sports game where you're beating the hell out of the opposing team at all times.
In Blades of Steel, you're never allowed the courtesy of merely stealing the puck. Instead, you must take it by force. The only way to get the opposing team to give up possession is to slam into a player until he falls over. He may sometimes become irritated at you before collapsing, though, and may grab you by the collar and begin punching you in and around the facial area. Immediately, all rink activity will stop so that you and your new friend can have a proper one-on-one fistfight, which plays out much like fights do in the beloved NES classic Urban Champion.
I love this. I really do. Sports games lost me around fifteen years ago or so, when they began to shift away from 8-bit bloodshed for the sake of more accurate simulation. To hell with that, I say. I'd be completely lost if you sat me down in front of a modern hockey sim, but if there's one thing I understand in video games, it's the concept of earning things through punching. If this is the way you think all video games should be, you'll enjoy Blades of Steel as much as I do.
Blades of Steel remains one of the most purely fun ice hockey games that you'll ever play. The gameplay is easy to grasp, and its simplicity makes for a balanced and fun two-player mode. Anyone can appreciate the intrinsic value of violence-based sports games, besides. It's well worth your 500 Wii Points.
YouTube, as always, happily provides a gameplay video...
...but much more importantly, it also hosts a touching vocal tribute. The singer mixes the game up with Nintendo's Ice Hockey, but his heart's in the right place, so I'll forgive him.
