NHL 2000

You can choose from all of the NHL teams, including the expansion Atlanta Thrashers. Play an Exhibition game to work on your tactics and strategies, and when you are ready for long-term competition, try to endure an 82-game Season, or just skip straight to the Playoffs. While in the game, you will have to learn when to make line changes and determine when it's a good time to pull the goalie. In addition to these tactical decisions, you must also deal with penalties and infractions including offsides, two-line passes, and icing.

Released: 31 August 1999
Platforms: Game Boy Color PlayStation Windows
Genres: Ice hockey Platformer Simulation Sports
Developers: EA Vancouver
Publishers: EA Sports
Modes: Multiplayer Single-player
Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
Themes: Action Non-fiction
Age ratings: ESRB E

About

NHL 2000 is an ice hockey video game developed by Electronic Arts Canada. It was released in 1999 and was the successor to NHL 99.

Keywords

ice hockey
ice skating
artificial intelligence
cartoony
box art - real photos
year in the title
difficulty level
commentary
penalties
montreal canadiens
new york rangers

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

A season mode (later developed into a Franchise mode) with a retirement feature, drafting, and player trades were added to the series in this game, as well as the ability to use any photo for created players' faces, which is textured onto the head. Similar gameplay was used in this version, as well as the previous version, NHL 99.

Another mode in NHL 2000 is the Tournament mode, in which the user chooses 16 countries (only 18 countries were available in the game) to play a round robin. After the round robin, eight teams are eliminated and then the remaining eight have a "playoff," but instead of it being out of seven games it was single-elimination. Eventually, a winner is crowned gold in the championship match. There is also a third place match for the losers of the semi-finals.

Reception

The PlayStation and PC versions received "favorable" reviews, while the Game Boy Color version received "mixed" reviews, according to the review aggregation website GameRankings. Jim Preston of NextGen said of the PlayStation version, "EA Sports once again proves it does hockey better than anyone else on the planet."

Nash Werner of GamePro said of the PC version that "it's easy to overlook the flaws when everything else fits like a glove. If you're a fan of NHL '99, you'll love NHL 2K [sic]. It was worth the wait." William Abner of Computer Games Strategy Plus gave the same PC version three stars out of five, saying, "In the end, NHL 2000 is more of a side step than it is a leap forward.