Developer: Treyarch Publisher: Midway

Released: February 23, 1998 Rated: E 4/10

Okay, now this is just lame, Midway. If you haven’t done so first, check out the profiles of the two Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey titles, where you’ll find a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the first game, and a noticeable reduction of this enthusiasm for the follow-up. I’m still not the type to get too negative about a game that’s simply not much of an update, but this is egregious, as many publications of the time were apt to point out. This may have been given to a different developer, with a rookie team at Treyarch handling the jersey swaps, player building, and Olympic formatting, but from a gameplay perspective, it is practically identical to Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey 98. 

What little work is put in to make this “Olympics-branded” doesn’t extend much beyond imagery or roster rearrangement. That being said, it’s actually kind of wild to even approach this game with the same amount of playability or content as an NHL-branded offering, since the team selection is whittled down to only 14 countries, with about half of those being borderline unusable with zero recognizable names outside of any time spent actually watching the Nagano Winter Olympics. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Japan may be standard entrants in international play, but unfortunately it’s no World Cup, where balanced brackets and a more celebrated field of competitors warrant a duplicate release every four years. One sort of oddball presentation quirk that was included to balance things out, though, is the “defections” option for roster management, where the player is asked which athlete is defecting and where he is seeking asylum.

Outside of fitting things into this internationally-branded package, though, this is, again, just a lame repackaging of already-released gameplay and options.This shameless re-release of the same game only a few months later to capitalize on the Nagano Olympics and their inclusion of NHL stars infamously resulted in IGN awarding their first ever 0/10 score, as they refused to indulge Midway by claiming any significant changes that would warrant shelling out for the same game in the span of only three months. And given that it’s less interesting, in my opinion, to play as Olympic teams than proper old-school NHL rosters, and that Olympic Hockey ‘98 is much harder to find and a bit more expensive than its NHL-branded counterparts, there’s just no reason whatsoever to look for this one, whether you have a Gretzky game in your collection already or not.

Additional Information

Saves: Controller Pak

Compatible With: None

Players: 1-4

Print Guides: None

Aggregate Critical Reception (GameRankings): 43.53%, based on 6 reviews

Other Releases: EU, April 1998

JP, July 16, 1998

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