Videogame Gold for Any Developer Mining for Nostalgic Remakes
Games that take traditional concepts and turn them on their head appeal to my nonconformist sensibilities. Base Wars for the NES, Cyberball in the arcade--Battle Chess on the PC, all games that use the familiar as a main ingredient while throwing in a little spice of crazy for flavor. Mutant League Hockey (and Football, for that matter) is a hockey game, to be sure, but it's also features additional concerns for the players such as chainsaws, minefields, pitfalls that offer no respite for mortality.
The graphics and sound for the time are god-awful. The Genesis as we all know was really the black sheep of the 16-Bit era after the TurboGrafx 16 made it stateside, and this was made more apparent once Nintendo finally decided, hey, the NES is done, let's get in this 16-Bit game all the kids are talking about. However, the game play was precisely what owners needed on a console that was suffering from a deluge of boring sports games with names like Madden, NHL, what have you. The balance of play was so skewed that regardless of what innate talents players of the EA NHL series could bring to the table, they'd always get screwed over by senseless terror via a deadly hockey stick that required very little skill to bring about by one's opponent. This amounted to a game of pure, delicious chaos, and turned off probably anyone who was good at Joe Montana Football or whatever.
While I can't recommend the game as something you should seek out and buy, it's worth checking out just to whet your appetite for a more modern take of the concept. Hockey is already a violent sport, and throwing in deadly consequences only makes sense to this reviewer. Join me in clamoring for a remake, either from EA's slave-driven development camp or a spiritual one from a more democratic developer.