Hat Trick (Arcade)

The rules and structure we apply to sports are what give these tests of physical skill their appeal, for without them, it would just be a matter of tossing the most heavily muscled men at each other until one team has none left. However, integrating team management, plays, fouls, and other elements of the ice hockey format doesn’t make for a quick and accessible arcade game, especially when you consider things like how long a typical game can go on for. To turn around as many players as possible while still providing some semblance of the sport, Bally/Sente reduced the game down to the barest essentials, and unsurprisingly, it feels like a lot was lost in the process.

Hat Trick boils ice hockey down to a two on two competition viewed from above, the player controlling one player on offense who has free movement and a goalie who is locked to a small vertical range in front of the goal indicated by a rectangle. The idea is that you’ll have the regular skater out chasing the puck, battling with the other player’s free player to get towards the goal and smack it past the goalie to earn as many points as possible in two minutes. If it is a tie, the game will go on twenty seconds longer to give the players time to break it before wrapping up the experience and asking for more quarters for another round of this stripped down hockey game. While you definitely won’t get the same thrills you would from a full hockey title, Hat Trick’s concept isn’t doomed on arrival necessarily. You’ve essentially got the main roles covered, the goalie’s role defensive and the offense player giving you the freedom of movement to more directly compete with either another human player or an AI controlled opponent. It’s definitely simple and almost not too far off from playing on a less restrictive air hockey table because of it, but there are a few quirks that make it less than that similar reinterpretation of hockey rules.

The most immediate issue players will find with Hat Trick are the controls. You only have one joystick and a button to work with in the game and the first question you’ll likely ask is how do you control the movements of the goalie and offense player separately. The answer is that the stick moves them both at the same time, the goalie unable to move horizontally and only having a small area in front of the goal he can move up and down in but his actions will always be tied to those of the free skating player. This means as both players are vying for the puck, the goalies will be moving around as well, the issues with this design quickly becoming apparent. If the enemy player is near your goal and trying to shoot on it with the action button, you have to pick between trying to steal it with your offense player or doing the more effective blocking method of completely forgetting him for a bit to move your goalie to intercept incoming shots. The goalie is about 1/3 the size of the net opening so he can block effectively, especially when the enemy player is too close, but it’s not quite enough where you can just hope he’ll cover the opening well enough as you move your other player in to steal. When shots are made on your goal, you pretty much have to devote yourself to defense to avoid being scored on, and since the puck glances off the goalie instead of being caught by him, it means the other player can continue to smack it towards the net until a bad bounce sends it off into a more open area of the ice. Defense is fairly boring because you’re just sliding around the goalie and leaving your other player spinning around the ice to do it effectively and close range shooting becomes an awkward battle of trying to slip past a player who now has a fairly strong advantage, but the puck can slip through with a bit of work so it’s not constant stalemates at least.

Hat Trick is a bit better when the puck is closer to the center of the rink. Getting possession of the puck requires you to move your character so his stick directly touches it, after which it is properly attached to your character until you make a shot on goal. When there are two players both trying to grab it the process of getting a hold of it feels a bit fiddly for something moving at such a dynamic speed but the little shuffle to gain control at least prevents play from going far too quickly. Once you do position yourself right to claim the puck it’s not totally safe, the other player able to swing in and pull it free if they can swing their stick around and touch the puck for a change in possession. Going back and forth with who has the puck and trying to break free of the struggle to start shooting on goal are where Hat Trick shows potential, the competition felt much more when you’re directly interacting rather than one player moving freely as the other moves a passive goal blocker. Shooting from any distance is almost guaranteed to fail since the speed of a traveling puck is easy enough for the other player to react to and block with their goalie, so essentially the goal of the mid-rink battle is to carry it far enough towards the net that the other player has to start focusing on their goalie’s movements, after which finding the gap in their defense to score becomes the only concern.

Luckily, if you have no one willing to play this minimalist hockey game with you, the game does pack a built-in computer opponent who is only somewhat bad at the game. While its offensive player can fight for the puck and shoot on goal about as well as a human player, it clearly doesn’t prioritize its goalie well enough, meaning you can slip shots by as the computer doesn’t adjust its tactics to account for your proximity to the goal. Because of this quirk in the artificial player’s mind, it’s hard to go back to Hat Trick unless you’ve got a human player to go up against. Sure, the AI isn’t a pushover, but it’s easy to get a score lead due to their goalie problems and afterwards you can just burn time moving the puck around, the game not seeming to have a good counter for the strategy. A human player could at least potentially identify your strategy and try to overcome it by anticipating the way you’ll move while you’re stalling out the game, not to mention they’ll likely do much better at keeping your lead from ballooning, but even if they do, their involvement instead comes with a lower scoring game since switching to defense as necessary is such a sound strategy.

Because things were pared down to the bare essentials, there’s not much left to say about Hat Trick. It does have the odd but nice touch of the ice actually getting scuffed by the movement of the two players on offense, a Zamboni driving by after the end of the game to resurface the ice for the next game, but it’s hardly the level of visual flair needed to make the game exciting, especially since everything else looks so plain and the goalies are practically Foosball players in design. The scoreboard tracks both points and saves as well as showing the timer, and with that bit of information shared, that is essentially all the information that can be provided on Hat Trick unless I start describing the make and model of the arcade cabinet itself. While The Game Hoard can rarely provide every piece of information on a game so clearly, Hat Trick reduced ice hockey down to a form that can be described in its totality, the strength of such an accessible form coming with the weakness of how it was ultimately achieved.

THE VERDICT: Hat Trick condenses ice hockey down into a quick bite-sized arcade experience, but this simplification came with some unfortunate compromises. Controlling both offense and defense with the same joystick simultaneously means you essentially have to abandon one to focus on the other, making time spent as the goalie often come down to walling shots while you can’t justify moving the free player to try and intercept. The easily defeated computer player doesn’t do much to help, but even with two human players at the cabinet, Hat Trick’s systems are too rough to keep players around for long, not enough control provided to make anything but the confrontations at center rink dynamic.

And so, I give Hat Trick for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. When it’s the two offense players shuffling around the puck and trying to gain control, Hat Trick is at its best, even if that best is still a pretty low level of excitement. When the two players are actively competing there is room for some strategy, even if that’s just simple tactics like trying to break away and shoot or trying to stall. Once a player has gotten too close to your goal, Hat Trick slips into that position where the goalie must be prioritized, the offense player moving off to who knows where as he’s fed the same inputs as the character who must block shot after shot. Attempting to squeeze your offense player in is possible but can be unnecessarily risky since your goalie can handle defense pretty well and the puck is likely to bounce away at some point, the best plan being to hold your ground until it’s safe to get your other player into the thick of things again. Once you realize the computer opponent doesn’t employ these tactics as much as it should the single player play is nearly trivialized, but it can handle offense pretty well to almost make up for it. With another human player there are some small moments that can be fun, but the game as a whole is so shallow and odd in its control design that you’ll likely be wishing for a sports game that is at least slightly more complex and allows for greater strategic action.

Reducing a sport down to its essentials isn’t necessarily a recipe for failure, and Hat Trick didn’t actually sink too far in doing so. The competition for the puck in the middle shows there was potential, but the goalie control was a big misstep. It’s not hard to imagine a two joystick system working or even just giving the goalie an up and down button to work with instead. If the player had to balance two players at once defense could be more thrilling, and while it may seem at first like too much power is given to defense, splitting focus could allow for more slip ups that favor the offense than a design that instead encourages the player going for hard switches between full offense and full defense focuses. Simplifying a sport for an arcade machine is not a bad idea at all, but Hat Trick’s approach to it sadly wasn’t a winner.