Blades of Steel on the NES is Great

Blades of Steel on the NES is a great hockey game. This, along with Ice Hockey, are two of my favorite sports games on the console. I also have a lot of memories of playing this one.

I had no idea this was originally an arcade game. Much like the other arcade ports I played on the NES, my first experience was with the NES version of the game. I’m sure this was similar to how other kids experienced some arcade games. Not everyone grew up near an arcade, and if they did, not all arcades had the same games.

Some people on the internet like to pretend that everyone grew up the same way, which isn’t the case. I can only speak about how I played video games and the small town I grew up in. You might’ve had a different experience, which is great.

Anyway, I played a lot of Blades of Steel with my friend Joey. It was one of the games that he owned for the NES. He had games like 1942, Mario/Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet, Final Fantasy, and Blades of Steel. I don’t remember if he owned anything else. Let’s get into this classic Konami game and see what it has to offer.

TLDR: One of the Best Sports games on the NES.

Narrative

There isn’t a story in Blades of Steel. The closest thing you can do is create a story for one of the tournaments. Aside from that, there isn’t something that you could consider to be a story, like a career or franchise mode.

Gameplay

There isn’t too much to the gameplay, and there really doesn’t need to be. You play a game of hockey, and you can fight from time to time. Konami managed to make both the fighting and hockey pretty fun in this game.

There is a decent collection of teams to choose from. Because the game doesn’t have an NHL license, team names are excluded from the game. So, you have cities and jersey colors that occasionally match up to their real-world counterparts:

• Toronto
• Vancouver
• Montreal
• Edmonton
• New York (The Rangers, not the Islanders)
• Chicago
• Los Angeles
• Minnesota (North Stars, not the Wild)

Sadly, there isn’t a Detroit team, which immediately makes the game terrible (I hope this is taken as a joke, because I really don’t want to have to explain it as I did in a YouTube video I did about the series).

The rules are a little different. There are a few penalties in the game, and there is icing. For the most part, the game lets you play with as few interruptions as possible.

You can play an exhibition game or a tournament. There are a few difficulty settings that add something fun to the game. You can also fight in the game, which takes the player to a side scrolling boxing screen.

During intermission, there are advertisements for other Konami games. This is where you can play a little Gradius. It isn’t much, but I like this.

That’s really about it. There isn’t too much to this game, which is something you can say about many arcade sports games on the NES. It is much more fun when you play it with a friend, but I also have fun by myself.

Visuals

The graphics are very good for the time this game was released. You can easily tell which team you’re playing as, and the graphics on the fight screens and penalty shot screens are good. I don’t see anything wrong with the graphics as a whole.

Each team has its own color scheme. This is the only way to tell them apart, and they do stand out from each other. The colors mostly reflect what the team colors were back in the 1980s, and they might not reflect what they are now.

There are little cut scenes for scoring a goal, starting a game, and ending a game. These all look good enough for the time. I remember thinking they were cool when I was a kid.

The fight scenes look great! This was always the highlight of the game when I was a kid. They aren’t amazing, but the look of them is excellent.

Konami’s games always had decent to excellent graphics on the NES. Blades of Steel is somewhere in between. It isn’t amazing to look at, but in the late 1980s, it was one of the better looking NES games.  

9/10. This one is a spectacular game. The controls are great, the graphics are very good, and it is a very fun game to play. There is a decent amount of content in a game like this, especially for an NES game.

Pros

• Good Controls
• Great Gameplay
• Good Graphics

Cons

• Small roster of teams
• No Detroit team (This is only a con for me)
• Few game modes

Conclusion

Blades of Steel is a game that means quite a bit to me. While it isn’t one of the games that I remember playing the most with my friend Joey, it is one that stuck with me. I feel like I write this all the time in these posts, but this was one of the games I got as soon as I started collecting NES games.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Konami made some of the best video games in the arcades and on home consoles. Contra, Castlevania, and other games were all over the place. Blades of Steel would eventually become a series, but it isn’t the most memorable one in their library.

Going back to play this game is always fun. Most of my memories of this game are of me playing it with my friends. That is something I can say about many of the games I played in the 1990s. It always made things a little more fun. Those memories, in part, are a big reason why this is one of my favorite NES games.

If you liked this post, check out some of my other posts about NES games. Such as BurgerTime or PaperBoy.