von Ozbourne

Been quite some time, but it's finally time to release the final game in the Genesis/MegaDrive World Championship series. This one ended up having an unexpected amount of stuff to do [especially since I had always passed it off as yet another reskinning of the NHL 96 engine], not to mention simultaneously assembling a note file so I'll actually have some idea of what the hell I'm doing when I have to go back and fix something. Either way, this game feels like the game that EA was supposed to release in place of what would now be called the "Early Access" version that is NHL 97. Interesting that it took outsourcing to THQ to do it... So anyway... Presenting IIHF 98! Released in 1998 ahead of the World Championships in Switzerland, this will be the eighth year and eleventh installment in the World Championship series for the 16-bit SEGA console. The game features the top 26 teams by IIHF ranking and the rosters from that year, plus five bonus "unranked" teams. While many aspects were carried over from the previous two year's games, outsourcing this one resulted in a number of graphical changes that set it apart from its NHL counterpart. [Again the team ratings proved to be an issue, but the interesting part is that the "solution" proved perfectly fine as the supposed #1 overall rated team didn't even make the playoffs in half of the simmed seasons, making it a somewhat irrelevant metric.] While THQ took over development of the NHL game this year, the IIHF was not impressed with last year's game EA developed game, and insisted that the old development team return to work on the IIHF version. Team 1920 took the opportunity to not reuse any assets from the previous game and create a whole new look. In addition, this is the first year that a full licensing agreement was made with the IIHF, allowing the game to feature the national team logos of every team at center ice and not just the ones that were negotiated separately. Also additional IIHF official sponsors were included on the Jumbotron even though the team logos were taken out. The modest dev team may have also included a tongue-in-cheek jab. While the team photo was held over, a new "Winner is You!" photo was created in honour of the Olympics that were recently completed. This image may or may not have taken the better part of an evening to get just right due to the multiple palettes required and limited number of sprite tiles to work with, plus grinding through some mental fatigue, so dammit I'm showing the silly thing off! New player award art was also created. While not understanding the inclusion of an "EA Award" [which basically had the same selection criteria as the Hart, Ross and Pearson anyway], it did make for an opportunity to include another sponsorship mention. Anyway, that's enough adoing for one night. Hope this one holds up. IIHF 98.bin

Huh, It could also be that I simply conflated the two, as dudes that are heavy and good at hitting, would obviously also enjoy going around handing out free hits. Still find it odd that checking preference would affect the player's overall score [as many as 6 points] when shooting and aggression rightly don't. I will say that I have been spending a lot of time recently, exclusively with the later games and the stats seem to be slightly different. And not just in that a "0" score translates to a 40-44 in-game rating, all 5's is a 100 overall player, and all 6's = 120 overall. And then there is the mysterious "Unknown" stat for goalies in the 96-98 engine. Not sure what this "Unknown" goalie stat is. I've speculated that this might be a goalie's preference to play/freeze the puck after a save, but I'm not positive. Another question mark is "Durability" as I've injured starting goalies by charging them [Osgood seems particularly susceptible], but it's not something that I've been able to check into enough to find a pattern.

I noted that Checking is a rated stat. [As in when the number is in/decreased it likewise affects the player's overall rating] and that it seems to influence a player's ability to execute a check. A 6 will mean that you can Scott Stevens anyone into oblivion while a 0 means you're basically just caressing their shoulders as they brush past you. Roughness and Aggressiveness don't affect overall rating, but seem to be there to influence preference. I'd always figured that Roughness would influence penchant for taking penalties and throwing hits, where Aggressiveness would be chasing the puck/challenging the shooter type stuff, but I've also heard that Roughness may also be mislabeled from shot/pass preference and Aggressiveness is actually the taking penalties thing. Makes sense for the aforementioned Bourque with his 5 Roughness [apparently to go with his 6 shot accuracy] and 2 Aggressiveness [didn't take that many penalties] On a side note: I found another NHL98 "Mr Average" in Edmonton's Ralph Intranuovo. Look at all of those 3's... Not quite a perfect clean sweep as the Center position is fifth in the list, although the player number of 3² kind of tries to compensates for that in a mental gymnastics kind of way?

Just came across this guy in NHL 98 and figured it might qualify. We'll call him the Calgary Flames', Cale "Mr. Average" Hulse. Coincidentally enough, Right D is also the third position in the list. Too bad James Patrick already took number 3 and he didn't weigh 16 lbs less or he could have gone for the sweep.

I always figured weirder than Beezer's short name was that he can face off against his clone in Florida. And if Florida plays the other New York team, Fitzpatrick gets to be the back up for both Beezer and Healy, just like back in the pre-Original 6 era. Weird because they did have a team of clones in NHL Hockey with San Jose [although you couldn't really tell with only player numbers], but they did a decent job of limiting clones in '93, only to mess up again with Anaheim and Florida a year later.

I can confirm that this is "possible". The caveat however is that you will need to do a bit more to the ROM to prevent the game from crashing when it's trying to access those non-existent players in the Pre-Game Scouting Report or Line Editor menu. I guess it might depend if your play style is to ignore all of that.

If you wanted to, you can change that actually. First time trying out NOSE, I accidentally toggled off "Auto Re-Order Lines on Move" as well as on delete. [the "L" icons on the top of the Players window] Was a bit annoying as I was changing things around and had to fix the lines after each change. Didn't discover the reason for the problem until I moused over all of the icons to see the tool tip pop up. I can see pros and cons to having that set on or off, although typically setting the lines is one of the last things I do now so it's not that important anymore.

Actually I've tested that after @kingraphhelped me find the offset for those pre-game ratings. They don't seem to have any relation to team performance. And frankly the fact that they are hard coded in the game data when you can create and trade players at will just seems weird to me. [I mean, the original NHL Hockey would change the pre-game lineup checkmarks after the player stats were tweaked in NOSE and they didn't even allow trading in that game!] I can add to that that in my testing of NHL96, whatever the team performance rankings [Powerplay, Goalie, etc...] were, this seemed to correlate with the teams performance in a season. This was why when I was testing my graphics changes in my IIHF mod I would end up using Estonia [originally Detroit] I also tried editing the teams in both in game trades [traded all of the worst ranked players to Detroit and all of the best ranked players to Ottawa] as well as editing player data in NOSE [changed all Colorado and New Jersey player attributes to 0, overall 40s, and Anaheim and Winnipeg to all 6s, overall 120? (99)] Didn't make a lick of difference. Detroit, Colorado and Jersey still made the playoffs, Ottawa and Anaheim didn't, and Winnipeg was swept in first round. However, I will note that I tried this again, using Winnipeg as my selected team this time, and they won. But I've already noticed that game does seem to give a stat boost to the player team anyway. Somewhere in there is also how end of season awards are determined. For example in my IIHF 95 ROM, China's Hua Geng [formerly known as Calgary's Mike Vernon] would routinely win the Vezina despite being rated something more fitting for a 25th ranked team. The good news is that while 97 seems to suffer from the same faulty logic, 98 seems to have a bit more randomness inserted into the AI. The first two times I tried to sim a complete season, as the defending-and-soon-to-be Stanley Cup Champion Detroit Red Wings no less, I didn't even make the playoffs! I then ran through eight more simmed seasons as different teams and ended up with eight different Champions [none of which were my team]

I am curious about this. Haven't had the time to figure this out by myself, but how much does the order affect? Specifically, in '95 it would be nice to have the teams perform in season mode as you might expect their team ratings would suggest. In lieu of being able to edit the behind the scenes ratings [that annoyingly have nothing to do with the pre-game rating number], would arranging your teams to correspond with the ranking of the NHL teams you are replacing, and then alphabetizing them after the fact, mean that the teams would perform more realistically in simulated games? The additional problem I've encountered with 96-98 is that NOSE doesn't allow you to set the default menu and match-up options [which is too bad since I usually prefer 10 minute periods with line changes]. So in addition to reordering teams to best match the Even-Strength, Power Play, Goalie, etc.. ratings that would determine simulated season and playoff performances, it could also be a workaround for configuring the teams you want to replace the previous year's Stanley Cup finalists. I just haven't worried about it yet as i don't know how well it would affect what I want to do and would rather avoid wasting the effort for naught.

Figured as much. Glad to hear you're on the case.

I'm curious about this myself. Not to give false hope, but I noticed while poking around in NHL98, that the Carolina Hurricanes graphics and roster data were located in the spot between Florida and Los Angeles [where Hartford should be]. So while I know this is possible, in 96-98 at least, it would be related to pointers somewhere in the hex data. The only tiny issues here being that this is assuming that this knowledge is even transferable to the 94 game engine and I have no idea where to find that data anyway. That said, if it turns out that this isn't possible, I would be willing to volunteer my services to rearrange the graphics. I have a player card EARE companion "tool" that I've been looking to test more anyway. At least that would make the player photos a bit less bother to rearrange.

Just raising my hand, but I've actually road mapped and figured my way around most of the 96-98 engined games. Still a few holes to fill as far as code work goes, but I've gotten enough to go on to do complete graphical facelifts anyway. If you're interesting in diving into those I can save you some time by sharing my notes [just need to see about getting them into a format that doesn't use so much shorthand] and noting what I still need to figure out. [with which having a collaborator would help me out too]

Haha, In that case, sorry, but I had to.

Curious... What's the difference between the EIHL Champion, EIHL Cup Champion, EIHL Grand Slam, EIHL KO Cup Champion and EIHL Playoff Champion? At least Erhardt and Gardiner could replace the Campbell's and Wales conference, but which of those would be closest to the President's [best regular season record]? Also I was mostly curious about what the awards looked like. Other than the Patton Conference, not listed on Elite prospects... ...and your Devils winning the Monteith Bowl a couple years back... can't seem to google-fu a picture of a physical incarnation of an individual player award anywhere.

Thanks for the mentions guys. As an aside, I noted that the description, but not the player award trophies were changed. Was curious what player awards the EIHL actually had, but searches come up empty. Does the EIHL even have physical trophies to hand out? Or do they just have a list on a wall in a head office or something... [a plaque at least?]

I'm not sure about the SNES, but if I recall, holding A+C+start and hitting reset on the Genesis will erase all saved data, so something similar to that could work for you. I've also accidentally found that trying to simulate an entire season and then pressing reset when the game explicitly tells you to "DO NOT PRESS RESET !!" will scrub all changes as well. Imagine this would probably happen to all of the games if you were so careless. [and aren't into finger gymnastics]

Nice stuff. Always like to see some appreciation for the old WHA.

I've noticed that all of the NHL games have some art and code assets left over from previous games in the series, [using the previous year's Playoffs logo, having unused Ron Barr Hot/Cold commentary in non-Ron games, build note comments, etc.] but this one was a surprise. Took me a bit to realize what I was looking at, but getting near the end of the ROM data, it appears that while THQ was compiling the Genesis version of NHL 98 they pulled in some Madden assets. And just below that. Almost as interesting, [at least it's the same sport] but the entire title graphic from NHL 97 was left intact. Not the most egregious thing I've heard of getting compiled into a ROM, but it's fun coming across this stuff nonetheless.

Hey don't worry man, we all have to start somewhere. Personally, I trolled the tutorials in this forum for about a year and a half before I was confident enough to start taking part in discussions [and still asking questions] and posting my own ROMs.

This..... really? I am curious, does NHL 96, 97 or 98 work in Classicboy? I guess they would react the same way as they are basically build on the same engine. But the weird part is; those are the least modified as far as the actual ROM goes. Basically just graphical changes like with 92.

Actually I have some ideas that I'm looking to explore in this vein. Nothing decided on how I might do this just yet, but thanks for the interest.

Well there goes my idea....

I've had this happen while demoing a cpu vs cpu a match in NHL95. The kicker was that if the player had scored, it would have resulted in a tie game [and should trigger overtime] Instead, the player went with the lamest of ducks in a backhander from the hash marks, and that was the game. Would have been interesting to see a tying goal, although I have a feeling it would not in fact have triggered an extra frame. The weirdest part was that it didn't even let me look at the game stats afterwards. After the penalty shot was over, it just kicked straight out to the main menu.

Wait, did somebody say 97? Why yes. You read that correctly. Unfortunately I must admit that this was not a very fun project. I never really liked '97 as it just seemed like a lazy copy/paste job of '96, to the point where they didn't even change the year on the playoff bracket, [seriously, go check] and with uglier menu graphics. So unlike '92 to '96, there was no sense of discovery or even an interesting art direction that would allow me to flex my chops. But, the original plan from the start was to make an IIHF version of all of the Genesis NHL games, and by golly I wasn't going to quit now. I will however be skipping the retro review and just post the screen shots. I went with flags over goalie photos mainly to include more teams and make it more international versus player focused. Kept debating if I should change that, let me know what you think eh? soooo much tile renumbering. Finding which palette that Skoda ad used, and making use of a secondary unused one in order to make it green, was a pretty cool find. Finding out that there was a completely unused second palette [with the blue shades being changed to purple!?] was a weird but fortuitous find that conveniently allowed me to make a properly coloured logo and trophy combination. Liked how that part turned out. I was proud of myself for being able to implement all four 16 colour palettes available to me with that congrats screen. In conclusion, I will reference another anticlimactic ending screen... Oh yeah, forgot to note that, like '96, this engine still doesn't support the main menu option in NOSE. So the default match up does not reflect the Finals with Canada vs Sweden. As well as not being able to set the default game options. Add to that the wonky team rankings and season/playoff simmed game performances. [hence Estonia winning the Championship ?] At least exhibition games are fine. IIHF 97.bin

Despite trying to make sure that I was finished with a ROM before posting it, I've come across another that I wasn't quite happy with and made an adjustment to the IIHF 96 presentation. So here's an update. IIHF 96 1.1.bin What is in this update? Just instead of this... ...we get this. The upside is that teams are not only easier to navigate in NOSE, the timeout and shootout/penalty shot screens have something a bit better than "TIMEOUT TEAM" or Shootout TEAM vs TEAM. Came to this conclusion after trying something different in 97 and finding I was unable to use tile or palette editing to avoid making a doubled name bar. Figured that having the three letter ISO code in there was the lesser evil considering all instances.