Sizeable groups of people have been anxiously awaiting two things over the last several months: a labor deal, any deal, that would return NHL players to the ice, and the launch of Sony’s new handheld, the PlayStation Portable.

It makes a certain kind of sense, then, for Sony to make Gretzky NHL available for the PSP launch, and kill two birds with one stone. Or score two goals with one slap shot. Or…well, you can probably supply your own analogy and reach the same conclusion. With EA Sports declining to do the same, and 2K Sports apparently not quite ready to start releasing handheld sports titles, 989 Sports has a de facto monopoly on the PSP hockey market.

I will give them credit for one thing: it’s a fairly solid game, visually, complete with pre-game light shows and “the players are taking the ice!” videos. Gretzky NHL won’t win any awards visually, but it won’t make your eyeballs bleed, either, and that’s always important for handheld games. The player models do have some barely noticeable jaggies around the edges, but that's about the only visual issue I have with the game.

The gameplay is a little bit iffy, primarily because the analog stick on the PSP is going to take some getting used to. I found it difficult to glide around on defense with the ease to which I’ve grown accustomed on the PS2 and Xbox, resulting in very few satisfying checks, and an insane completed pass percentage rate from the CPU. Additionally, the computer-controlled players for the human team seem to have an inordinately difficult time picking up on loose pucks and rebounds. More often than not, if I want to clear out a loose puck around my goal, I need to take control of the defenseman manually and do the job, rather than the AI picking up on the puck and automatically switching my control to him once the defenseman has picked it up on his own. The net result is a hockey game that feels like a perpetual game of 1-on-5 on defense.

There are a handful of game modes available in Gretzky NHL. You can play a single season (but not a career), you can play a quick exhibition game, and you can even play 2-player games via a direct head-to-head connection (“Ad-Hoc Mode”), or online through a wireless LAN. Obviously there’s no way to communicate with your rivals if you’re playing via LAN (also known as “Infrastructure Mode”), but perhaps someday an ingenious accessory maker will come up with a way to use the USB connector to do that.

Honestly, there’s only one portion of Gretzky that I can out-and-out trash, and that’s the abysmal audio. The crowd and player noises are realistic, but they’re ultimately just so many grunts, cheers, and groans. Audio commentary, a staple of sports video games for basically the last 10 years, is non-existent. What speech is in the game is limited to PA announcer duties: goal announcements, penalty announcements, post-game announcements, and so forth. Seeing as how PSone sports games have at least rudimentary commentary despite basically 700 MB of storage space, the only explanation I can find for why commentary couldn’t be included on a 1.8 GB UMD is Sony’s “please don’t stream off the disc” plea. Since continuous streaming reduces the battery life available for gameplay, it makes sense that features that would make heavier use of the optical drive would be reduced. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.

In the end, you’ve got a game that, while it can’t compete with the hockey titles available for the PSP’s big brother, still has a solid look and feel to it, despite the gaping hole left by the lack of commentary. It’s not the best PSP launch game on the market, but if you’re starved for something, anything, that bears a resemblance to the sport of hockey, Gretzky NHL is for you. Otherwise, wait for either a price drop, or for the 2005-06 hockey season, when the selection of hockey titles should be better.