Blades of Steel's AI is excellent in this respect. If you're in possession of the puck, members of the opposition track your movements in a surprisingly realistic fashion. If you begin turning to the right, they'll adjust accordingly. However, if you check your motion quickly and speed to the left, it's possible you'll open a small, yet significant shooting opportunity.

Having a crack at the goal is a real joy in Blades of Steel. Press the 'shoot' button, and your player starts to wind back his stick. With a mixture of directional control and time-sensitive power, you can hit the puck with a refreshing degree of accuracy. You can even perform 'dummy' shots that fool AI-controlled defenders. You actually see them react to your ploy as you stand poised to crack the puck netwards.

It's rather sad, then, that Blades of Steel lacks a decent front end. Its offering of Exhibition, Playoffs and Season modes is adequate, but no more. It's easy to get inured to the EA games, with their reams of stats, televisual-style presentation and countless play modes. In contrast, when you play a modern game that doesn't have such trappings, it somehow feels a mite soulless.

It's galling, too, that it's a bit too easy to play BOS matches with one player. Rather than passing the puck around, practice enables you to dribble through defences with a solitary man. You can, if you'd rather, stroke the puck between team members and construct beautiful build-up play. But the success rate of such a strategy just isn't as high... so, in many ways, you're only kidding yourself if you do so.

As ice hockey sims go, Blades of Steel is a more cerebral game than the pinball-like Gretzky. We'd recommend it to a thoughtful brand of player. Is it the best of its genre on the N64? Possibly. It's such a subjective argument, we couldn't say for sure. But it's pleasantly close, at very least...