NHL Blades of Steel is a hockey game developed by Climax Studios and serves as the GBC counterpart to NHL Blades of Steel '99 for Nintendo 64. It feels like a slightly more upgraded port of Blades of Steel on the Game Boy, as it has less lag and is a smoother, faster experience overall.
Objectives
- Wins one match
- Hardest difficulty
- Ends input early
- Emulator: BizHawk 2.11.0
Notes
I lose a few frames selecting my favourite team, the Edmonton Oilers (you know I gotta pick them).
I learned that if you bump into players on the other team in certain ways, they can boost you forward, and I use this in some goals to close my distance to their goalie faster. Some goals look a little weird because I need the goalie to move a certain way so they don't catch the puck.
I score 5 goals before retreating behind my own team's net and end input. This causes the computer player to get stuck on my net for the end of the first period. Since periods 2 and 3 start us off in the centre, my opponent is able to score four goals. Each period, they score 2 goals and then end up getting stuck on the net again.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
That led me to an important question — do both games actually share the same engine? I’ve seen cases in the past where games were re-released with noticeable gameplay differences. One example was Tetris, where I was able to achieve a much higher score in the re-release than in the original version.
Because of that, I started looking into whether these two games were technically identical. From what I can tell, they are not. While they may appear nearly the same visually, this version has physics that have been described as “late-90s NHL hockey with the Blades of Steel name attached.”
Given those differences, I can’t confidently agree with
alexheights1 that this run is not optimized. Different physics would naturally produce different gameplay possibilities, which could lead this submission to take a different approach.
My main concern, in terms of identifying obvious issues, was whether the score remained exactly one point apart when ending input early. That is exactly what happens here. However, I still wanted additional proof that the games behaved differently.
To test this further, I copied the inputs from
alexheights1’s run and aligned them with the first scoring sequence in this submission — and the attempt failed. So, the games clearly do not operate the same way.
Accepting to "Standard".
