Mr. Eight-Three-One | Backyard Hockey 2005 Gameplay @MrEightThreeOne | Uploaded 7 years ago | Updated 15 hours ago
Well, I guess I had to upload something at some point or another, right?

This is Backyard Hockey 2005, one of the very last Backyard games ever made (no, nothing from 2007 onward counts, don't let anyone tell you otherwise). I've had this game in my posession for...I think about two years now? I've had it beaten for a good while too, so I guess it was as good a time as any to upload a video of it.

I could have probably recorded this video at a higher resolution but this game honestly doesn't have enough detail to warrant doing such, plus the intro doesn't play if you go higher than 640x480 (minor inconvenience, but eh). Plus the 2D graphics such as the text get all pixellated when you do such (there's no anti-aliasing in this game), so the default had to do.

This is pretty much your standard pick-up game. I haven't unlocked everything in this game as you might have noticed, but I don't have that kind of patience. Once again, I tried to go mostly only Backyard Kids as is my tradition in these videos, often limiting myself to only one pro which I did here. Oh yeah, and I totally picked Team Humongous because why would I not do that? If that weren't an option, I'd probably have gone with the Melonheads instead.

And...yeah, I'm gonna be honest, this game is ridiculously low in difficulty. I barely even had to try to make this game a complete blowout. The biggest issue is that doing a one-timer is pretty much a game breaker. Almost 80% of the time, you can score by going down either side of the rink, then passing the puck to the guy in the middle and shooting. The goalie misses it quite often when you do that. Once you figure out that simple game-breaking technique, this game is almost a complete pushover. Heck, the AI even had pretty good players and I still killed them. You can even tell a bit later in this video that I pretty much gave up and started goofing off and barely playing well, particularly to run the clock down so as to not drag this video out too long. When you have a ten-point lead, why even bother?

In fact, the whole game is just kind of meh. It's really a shame that the easy difficulty really brings this game down enough, there was a lot of clear effort that went into this game. There's a heavy amount of unlockables, the graphics for their time were pretty lively and cartoony in true Backyard fashion, and the new music is seriously quite kick-butt. I especially LOVE the main menu music in this game. I wish I could love this game but unfortunately too many small problems just bring it down.

Oh, and as for the "Goal" and "Penalty" graphics glitching out and going seizure-inducing, that's actually an in-game bug. That's not some incompatibility or computer weirdness, it does this on every computer I've played this game on, even my old Windows XP desktop. Just wanted to clarify that before anyone asked.

Oh, and one last note I want to make. This is the very last Humongous game ever to use the classic cursor that originally debuted in Freddi Fish 1, all the way back in 1994. Since this game was actually released in 2004 (the game was named a year ahead of its actual release date), this means the cursor had a near ten-year run before finally being retired. Hard to imagine that whoever originally drew it wasn't expecting it to become such a staple of these games for almost all of the company's life. Granted, it was showing up much less often around this time; from 2003 to 2005, the only games it appeared in were the two Yaga Junior Adventures and this one. Still, to think it stuck with the company for this long is really something else. Definitely one of the icons of the company to me and I was happy to see it make one final appearance.

Well, enjoy.