When most people that play games today were young things always seemed so great at the time. The days seemed to go on forever and every sweet you ate was nicer than the last one. You can bet that the only thing that you can seriously say is better now than it was then is NHL games for Xbox & Playstation game consoles. They have just come on so much in the last 30 years since video games have become big.
You no longer have to push a white dot which is supposed to be your puck around the screen. You also no longer have to control featureless white matchstick men around a rink either. You do on the other hand still have to play the game for enjoyment. Not all games have advanced their game play to keep up with the increased ability of the platform they are written for. Lots have relied too much on the game's graphical presentation and not enough on the actual gaming essence. No matter how good something looks, it still has to be great fun to play and that is what games players will look for. The games that have gone down in history whether they have been hockey, NHL, console based or not, have all had one thing in common. They have all been very playable. In some, the presentation didn't really matter at all. Like the type with the falling blocks that you have to arrange, many games relied solely on their ability to keep you coming back for more. Hockey games have been no different and no matter who is on the cover of any NHL title, it's what's inside the box that has really mattered. The thing that games developers back in the day knew is what people really liked in a game. They didn't have the ability to display a few thousand fans jumping up and down every time a ball hit the back of the net in a hockey game. Well even if they had the ability then they didn't have the processing power of today's machines. In this day and age, games console hockey games are so far advanced that if they get any better then they'll be in the room with us. You never know, with the growing popularity of 3D TVs you may see something like a 3D hockey game before long. That technology is probably already with us it's just a case of making it affordable. Really that has been key to making hockey games that can be played on a games console. They have had to make something that a true hockey professional has put their name to in many cases. So it's not just about making something that looks pretty but is awful or slow to move. On the other hand it is not been a good idea to make something that has been easy to move but looks terrible.
People and especially the younger generation of today are extremely luck to be able to play NHL games for Xbox & Playstation game consoles the way that they do. So much has been done over years of development that it's hard to comprehend what early games were like. Suffice to say they were cumbersome at best.