Mario Lemieux Hockey (Genesis/Mega Drive)

After a full month of taking a look at games that star Super Mario, many of which were sports titles, a new month presents an opportunity to cover something different here at The Game Hoard.

So here’s a review of a sports game starring Super Mario.

If Mario Lemieux Hockey being a Sega Genesis game wasn’t enough of a tip off, this 1991 hockey title isn’t actually about the Nintendo hero that normally goes by the moniker Super Mario. Instead in this case, Super Mario was a nickname Pittsburgh Penguins center Mario Lemieux picked up while playing the sport. Riding high after leading his team to a Stanley Cup championship, Mario Lemieux would have been a hot name to lead a hockey video game, although he is also unfortunately the only real name featured as this game wasn’t made with the support of the National Hockey League. All the teams can’t look quite like themselves as a result, and while you do have stand-ins, they’ll be labeled simply as the team for Pittsburgh, New York, Vancouver, and so on. The colors can’t be quite right either for legal reasons so teams can end up with some pretty garish contrasts to their usual colors like the Chicago Blackhawks stand-in wearing bright blue and purple instead of red, black, and white. Besides seeing Mario Lemieux on the title screen and him nominally appearing in the game’s rather beefy stats screens you won’t even get much from the one man they did manage to sign, most players and teams being interchangeable and identical young men out on the ice.

When it comes to standard play in Mario Lemieux Hockey, the action is mostly fine. Games are three periods long and you can set them to last 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes based on how long you want a game to go, the action displayed with the rink viewed so the longer edge is horizontal. The players aren’t very large so many can appear on screen at once although the game is a bit slow to scroll into the area with the goal meaning your time to adequately shoot towards it is less than you’d hope for, especially with how fast both teams can end up reaching you and crowding the goal area by the time you can properly see the net well enough to line up an attempt. It’s actually not too uncommon for a few players to have crammed themselves into the goal from either team, but this actually can end up helping you as the main means of scoring seems to be bullying the goalie. Sometimes a puck can slip by the goalie through a good angle or serendipity, but the goalie often is pretty on the mark for blocking incoming shots, but not always catching it. If the puck bounces off them, you can then swoop in and smack the puck again, slipping it by him often enough that this becomes perhaps the most reliable method of scoring. It doesn’t work all the time, but even game-controlled players will frequently earn points not by getting good angles or moving in ways to confuse the goalie, but by just smacking the puck into him and then smacking it again should it ricochet back into their possession.

Controlling the player you want in Mario Lemieux Hockey can sometimes be a bit testy as well, the player swapping sometimes not sensing who is closest to the puck and your efforts to cycle to who you actually want might not be fast enough to have a relevant player near the action. On the bright side, it’s not too hard to steal the puck if you simply move into the player who’s controlling it, meaning outmaneuvering on offense and defense can be a bit more rich than the sloppy means of scoring. You can try and check opponents to knock them down and steal the puck, but this can possibly be a penalty seemingly based on the referee’s whims. Notably, Mario Lemieux Hockey does let you set how fair the referee is, the options being Fair, Tough, and Blind, and besides Blind being a sort of anything goes game, the other two seem less like they’re accurately calling and more like they’re just overlooking fewer penalties based on how strict they’re being. There’s little noticeable difference between knocking players flat and what constitutes a proper call for roughing or slashing, but luckily checks aren’t too crucial so you can avoid penalties if you so wish or take the risk if you think it might help. Players who receive penalties will be removed from play for a few minutes, leaving you down up to 2 players so you can end up with only three active players on the ice instead of the usual five if you’re not careful. The game even prevents you from doing checks once you have two men in the penalty box, although there are still infractions like Icing and Offsides you can get if you enable Pro Rules that are closer to true NHL hockey.

Mario Lemieux Hockey allows you to play in single match Exhibitions either against a computer-controlled team or a second player, but there is also a Tournament mode where sixteen teams compete to take the top spot. With your chosen team you’ll take on others in Best of 3 matches, and with there being four steps to taking home the championship, you can expect at least eight games. There are rare occasions when the gameplay might shift up a bit during a hockey game, these beings when players get into a fight or when a shootout is held to resolve a tie. Both of these can be played on their own straight from the main menu if you want to practice, but the one on one fistfights in Mario Lemieux Hockey are unfortunately rather rough. The skirmish is viewed from the side and both players have a few punch types to pull from as well as the ability to walk forward and back or duck. You might think this means you can try to fight smart, ducking blows or going for low blows if you expect the duck, but mostly it seems to boil down to frenzies of flying fists since you have a bit too much energy to spare and predicting attacks is often a waste of time compared to trying to be faster with your attacks. Fights don’t end up being very enjoyable as a result, and unfortunately the loser of the fight ends up the only one getting a penalty so you’ll be a player down if you lose the button mashing fest. You can disable fights, but tearing out part of hockey’s character shouldn’t be the better option than letting it stand.

Shootouts are a bit simpler, also essentially minigames but a bit more straightforward. Teams alternate taking a shot on goal from a set point, a teammate tossing the puck into the play and you need to time your hit so it will fly towards the goal. At the same time, you’ll want to press a direction to determine the point on the goal you want to aim for, the person controlling the opposing goalie able to try and block the different regions of the net to block the shot. It’s not really likely to arise often and not enjoyable enough to visit via the menu option, but this has more of the mindgames and consequences that the fighting sounded like it could have had if it hadn’t been so prone to rewarding frantic play over smart action. Neither does much to bring Mario Lemieux Hockey away from a mostly mild and sometimes clumsy hockey experience though, not that such small and rare elements were likely to be a saving grace in the first place.

THE VERDICT: Mario Lemieux Hockey mostly works as a passable 2D hockey game, but the little issues do add up the more time you spend with it. Struggles with switching to the player you want to be or the shooting game often boiling down to bullying the goalie rather than lining up smart shots means it doesn’t play as nicely as other adaptations of the sport before or after, and with even the fighting feeling weak in design, there’s not much worth noting about this Sega hockey title that mostly seemed to hope generic play and Mario Lemieux’s name would earn them some sales.

And so, I give Mario Lemieux Hockey for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A BAD rating. If this was the only hockey you game you had, you’d probably learn to accept its quirks. It’s not overly egregious with its issues, the slow screen scrolling is annoying but it also means you’ll get some time to actually swap to the player you want to be when on defense for example. You will always control a player who has the puck on your team unless you disable that option, but the crowded ice can make passing a bit of a weak plan that in turn leads to more reliance on trying to hit the goalie with the puck until he happens to get out of the way rather than setting up nice misdirects or teamwork. Thankfully bullying the goalie isn’t so reliable that it makes scoring a breeze so games can still come close, and the ease of stealing keeps both teams canny when they’re not just in the crowds of bodies that sometimes occur when players group up.  If you played a game or two you might not notice major issues, especially with fighting not being too common unless you try to fish for it, but over time Mario Lemieux Hockey weakens your interest in it by its minor flubs when it comes to elements outside the very basic fundamentals.

Unless you’re a big Pittsburgh Penguins fan, Mario Lemieux Hockey isn’t a hockey game with much to offer, and I imagine even those fans would probably want more than just Mario. Many licensed sports games appear and fade away fairly quickly with little reason to revisit them, and with Mario Lemieux Hockey’s gameplay having a decent handful of little issues, it really doesn’t do much to motivate looking back at this game in particular. If not for Lemieux’s Super Mario nickname I don’t know how many years it might have taken for me to even really register this game’s existence, so while it could have been worse, Mario Lemieux Hockey isn’t going to earn itself a legacy by being mostly generic with some niggling problems pushing it below mediocrity.