You know, for all the size of the National Hockey League and its subsidiaries, it doesn't seem like too many people know anything about it. Can you name five famous football guys? Probably not much of a problem. How 'bout baseball? Should be even easier. Hockey? My guess is that you're stuck at 2 or 3. One of those three might be Bobby Hull . . . or possibly his son Brett, who is pretty much as close to superstardom as an NHL player will get. Since it seems like every sports superstar is getting his or her on video game nowadays, the release of Brett Hull Hockey for the PC should come as no surprise.

	Accolade has made plenty of decent sports games and BHH continues the tradition. Sporting a NHLPA license, all the real NHL players and teams are here, though a team name or two has been switched to avoid hassles (The New York Islanders are here as the Long Island team). Each team wears authentic color uniforms in home and away colors. The entire game is very impressive graphically, using a lot of digitized video for menu backdrops and options screens. Brett Hull's smiling mug is everywhere . . . perpetually reminding you that this is HIS game you're playing. What makes HIS game so different from the others?

	Well, once you hit the ice, BHH plays very much like its main competition, NHL Hockey 95 from EA. There's 8-way movement, different kinds of shots and passes, and on-the-fly line changes. The speed of pro hockey is tough to recreate on a PC, but NHL 95 did it very well, and so does BHH. If the game plays too fast for you, you can adjust the speed to your liking. It's options like this that make this game look like a winner . . . almost everything is customizable. Player lineups can be modified by merely pointing and clicking. Audio effects, game penalties, and half a dozen other things can be set to "on" or "off" before any game. You can only imagine the havoc that might be wreaked if you turn penalties off. I wish they would have gone one step further and allowed you to toggle protective gear . . . 

	Ouch. Anyhow, one of the coolest features of the game is called Coach Team, and it allows you to customize your entire team at once. BHH rates each team in several categories by averaging player ratings based on real-life performance. However, you're able to alter those ratings using a unique allocation system that lets you spend points to upgrade abilities. This is done before each game and both teams get the same amount of points to allocate. This seems like it would be especially fun for two-player games where each player can play their favorite team and spend points to improve their weaker areas. You needn't spend all your available points, so two-player games can be handicapped by letting one player spend more than the other.

	New innovations such as that one aside, BHH still has the typical features common to all sports games. There is an instant replay feature that lets you check out your glories and goofs in slow-motion, and a save game feature that lets you pick up or put down the game at any time. If you play a full season of 84 60-minute games, you'll be saving and restoring a lot. I never thought 60 minutes could take so long. The A.I. in the beta copy I played still needed a little tweaking, but it's pretty obvious that the PC will play you tough and think nothing of running up the score. A hockey rink is not the best place to look for mercy. I found this out the hard way. If you think you can do better, look for BHH on your local shelves sometime real soon. It'll keep you and your joystick busy.