First-Person Winger: Hockey?
Cryptic Sea - they of the remarkable lo-fi flight sim A New Zero - have been in touch about their new game, Hockey? It's immediately an attention-grabber both because it applies A New Zero's back-to-raw-basics-then-outwards-again control philosophy/design to ice hockey, and because it takes the very rare step of giving a sports game a first-person perspective.
Watch the below video knowing that a) it's a beta and b) it was made in a week (as part of a time-out from developing the six-years-in-the-making Golf?). You can see what they're striving for and, I think, just how much more involving that perspective is than the zoomed-out, multi-man semi-RTS camera of more traditional hockey games.
Interested? You'll want to go give the open beta a try, then. It's primarily a multiplayer game (well, it is a multiplayer game, but if you want to go run around an otherwise empty rink on your own, I won't stop you) and you should know before you go in that it starts off very, very difficult. The controls are designed to recreate the movement and physics of the sport, not to follow familiar videogame rules. You will learn. You'll suffer first. But you will learn.
Extremely clever stuff. It's only the nuts and bolts of the game so far, but it's off to a great start.
