Your Guide to Living That Hurricanes Lifestyle

Your Guide to Living That Hurricanes Lifestyle

Support the local team, and a local business.

You’ll have to forgive us for letting our bias show for a moment, but our local favorites head into their first conference finals game in a few hours. The Carolina Hurricanes begin their series against the Montreal Canadiens this evening, where we are confident that they’ll sweep the conference set and move along to win the NHL championship against whoever has the audacity to show up to represent the Western Conference.

Look, the Hurricanes literally play just down the road from LRG headquarters. We can’t help but root for them. And if you happen to be local to the RDU Triangle and want to join in the festivities but felt the color go out of your face when you checked out ticket prices, don’t worry. We’ve got you. It just so happens that midway down the road between the Lenovo Center and LRG HQ is a little thing we like to call Limited Run Retail.

Now, you may know Limited Run Retail as an incredible place to pick up LRG releases that are otherwise out of print without paying eBay markups, but what you may not realize is that LRR also has an enormous selection of used games spanning consoles from the modern era all the way back to the venerable Atari 2600. That includes quite a few hockey games! And all of them sell for a heck of a lot less than a ’Canes ticket. Here are some highlights:

Tele-Game Pong Sports

Atari 2600

The most vintage of our secondhand hockey titles, Pong Sports is an Atari 2600 cartridge released by Sears (the retailer!) under their in-house Tele-Games label. It includes several game modes, including, yes, “Ice Hockey.” This version of “Ice Hockey” works more like foosball—it is, after all, a simple Pong variant—but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining to play against a friend.

NHL Hockey

Intellivision

NHL Hockey for Intellivision is nearly as old as Pong Sports, but it looks and plays a whole lot more sophisticated. It’s an Intellivision game, and sophisticated sports was that entire console’s raison d’étre, as Intellivision fans might say. Of course, you’ll want to ask a friendly Limited Run Retail team member to take a peek inside the box and make sure the keypad controller overlay is included. You know, for maximum sophistication.

Ice Hockey

NES

Ah, now here’s an all-timer. Ice Hockey for NES may not have the league license like its Intellivision predecessor did, but it does have brilliant pick-up-and-play design with a genius way of allowing team customization despite its simple nature: You build your team of players from three different archetypes (slow but powerful, fast but weak, and all-’rounder). It’s like fielding an entire set of rock-paper-scissors hands, but with hockey sticks.

Great Ice Hockey & Slap Shot

Sega Master System

For those brave few who joined the 8-bit console wars on Team Sega, Limited Run Retail has not one but two Master System hockey titles on offer: Sega’s own Great Ice Hockey, and the more esoteric Slap Shot. The latter is interesting, in part because it plays a lot like the all-time classic Blades of Steel, but also because it’s one of just two American Master System releases that only ever shipped with a blue cartridge label instead of the standard Master System red.

Brett Hull Hockey

Super NES

Hidden near the Master System section, you might spot a copy of Brett Hull Hockey for Super NES! This was a pretty cool take on the sport in its day, with a low camera angle (thank you, precious friend Mode 7) and actual voice clips by NHL announcer Al Michaels.

Gretzky NHL

Sony PSP

Just to be fair, here, we do have Gretzky NHL for PlayStation Portable (and its follow-up, Gretzky NHL ’06) for those of you who want a little Canadian representation. Technically, not a Canadien. But close enough to win a curling match, probably.

NHL2K10

PlayStation 2

Also on the retro Sony front, here’s 2K Sports’ NHL2K10. This came out in 2009. For PlayStation 2! A console from 2000! That is some crazy longevity. This release even supports Sony’s PS2 Broadband Adapter, to give you something to do with that thing since they’re still updating Final Fantasy XI but won’t allow you to play it on PS2 anymore.

NHL ’15

Xbox One

And, finally, bringing it closer to the modern era, we also found a lone copy of NHL ’15 for Xbox One. This game falls into that weird zone in video game chronology where it’s old enough to look dated but recent enough not to have an air of retro cool about it. But don’t let such superficial attitudes shape your tastes. Venture into the uncanny valley of retrogaming and enjoy a game whose player roster is mostly different from today’s team lineups but still has enough familiar names to spark recognition. Come on, it’s four bucks. You can’t even get a coffee or a gallon of gas with that kind of money anymore. Live a little.

And, of course: Go ’Canes!