A Look Back - Blades of Steel

The NES is known for being able to handle all types of sports games. The 8-bit console can display a lot of sprites at once, even if they generally share the same animation most of the time. A lot of sports are featured on Nintendo’s first console endeavor, and not just American ones either. Football, baseball and basketball got their starts based on American-based franchises. However, another infamous worldwide sport that came straight out of Canada also made its way onto the console more than once. This happens to be hockey. One of the very games that made hockey lovers drool over the NES happens to be Blades of Steel.

If you’re to say the phrase Blades of Steel to any hockey videogame fan, they are more than likely to begin generating hundreds of memories. It was one of the first games to feature hockey on the market, and it did a darn good job of allowing players to have a blast. Just like Tecmo Bowl with football, Blades of Steel features teams from the NHL in its heyday. This means teams like New York, Edmonton, Vancouver and Montreal among many others were featured. Blades of Steel was also one of the first sports titles to feature three different difficulty levels. You choose from the easiest Junior setting to the more difficult Pro setting.

The game was also one of the first sports titles or any NES game for that matter to feature a voiceover. No one really knows who it is, but when the game just starts up, a male voice shouts the name, “Blades of Steel!” He also has a role in actual games, saying preset phrases and words when you pass the puck or get into a fight. What also makes Blades of Steel unique is how it’s setup. When you choose how many players will be involved, you can get into either an Exhibition game or Tournament play. Exhibition is just like a pre-season game in the NHL. It doesn’t really mean a whole lot, as it’s just a head-to-head game to see who has the better team. Tournament play, however, is a little more involved. When you choose your team in this mode, you are immediately placed in a random bracket that has you going after the coveted trophy. It’s not the Stanley Cup granted, but it’s still a nice award to achieve at the end. Games become increasingly more difficult as players advance.

Blades of Steel isn’t the easiest game in the world to play. This is mainly because it can be confusing as to who you’re controlling at any given time. The AI was given some decent direction, as they act entirely on their own. Your team is comprised of five players at once on the ice at any given time. During face-offs, the time when each team’s center fights for possession of the puck, you have to rapidly tap a button to get it to your side. Once in possession, there’s one button for passing and one button for shooting. Passing is generally pretty easy, as the puck will sail to the teammate closest to you, unless you try to manually specify otherwise. Shooting is fairly straightforward as well. One button does it, and it’s more or less a slap shot every time. Slap shots are when a player brings his stick back like a golf club and then smacks the puck as hard as he can.

On defense, it’s a bit of a different story. When you don’t have possession of the puck, you have to do everything you can to get it away from your opponent, or stop it from going in your net. In hockey, there is a certain extent that you’re allowed to hit an opposing player with your body. This is known as ‘checking’. In Blades of Steel, however, there really is no limit, as the gameplay is purely arcade style. So no matter who you have control of on your team when defending, you can smack into an opposing player with the puck how you please by simply skating into them.

If you manage to land three successful consecutive hits on someone, they will usually fall down and lose the puck to you. Sometimes though, the physicality will cause a nice fist fight between you two. When the announcer declares a fight, the game shifts to an entirely different perspective. The camera zooms in to an area in front of the glass panes surrounding the ice rink and the audience going crazy. It’s during this time that you get to punch the living daylights out of your opponent until one of you goes down. It’s after these fights that teams have their only real chance at a Power Play. A Power Player is when your team has more members out on the ice than the opposing team. If you win a fight, the referee literally drags the loser to the penalty box for a certain amount of time, allowing you an advantage.

The most frustrating part of playing Blades of Steel is controlling your goaltender. This is the guy that’s obviously in front of your net, keeping the puck out of it. The way Blades of Steel is designed has you controlling both the regular skater you have on defense as well as the goalie at the same time. That sounds strange, but it’s actually how it works. Controlling the goalie is done by the simply pressing and holding of up or down on the D-Pad. So in other words, when you’re moving up and down with your skater, your goalie is as well. Sometimes you’ll find yourself looking at your goalie only and not paying attention to your skater simply because you’re fearful of the puck going in on you. You generally get used to it after a while, but it can be a royal pain in the neck.

The NES generation certainly wasn’t without its handful of sports titles. Almost every one in existence today has made some kind of appearance on the console. Most of them thankfully, are very fun and enjoyable. Blades of Steel is among them, and it may be in the top three of most enjoyable NES sports games. It’s designed for one and two players, so you can actually play this game with friends, family or total strangers. You do have to be careful when doing that though, as you can tend to really upset someone if you’re destroying them on the scoreboard. Nevertheless, while there are minute annoyances present in the gameplay, Blades of Steel is just one heck of a fun experience.