Shorties, part 1, Blitz: The League

[Dracos]

So, recently I've touched a bunch of games for short play cycles.  Normally, I wouldn't talk on them but hey, kicking off actual reviews and they're bad enough to be funny for the most part anyway~

Blitz: The League was an interesting game by Midway that mixed rap music, complex league dynamics, game to game caring, and somewhere deep inside a chewy and satisfying core of the original Blitz gameplay.  Somewhere.  It's there, just trust me on it.  Don't go looking for it though.  It'll take you a while.  A long while.  Blitz: The League had the longest load times of any game I've yet played.  I made a sad choice not to turn off the rap music immediately and I regretted it as it played on during the 5 to 10 MINUTE load times.  How that got acceptably out of QA and worse how that at all was created on the menu screens is beyond me.  It's also why having that original awesome gameplay perseved somewhere down the line and potentially deep and meaningful metagame season type play over it doesn't matter.  You'll be waiting in load times so long that you'll forget what game you are playing.  Indeed I finished a good deal of cavestory during a single playsession of a mere two football games.  Having to turn off the music to make these phenomenial load times not a rap radio station (It'd switch tunes after finishing one) was not cool.

In addition it offered an unwelcoming and messy play selection interface that moved it away from its arcadey roots and towards madden-clone.  A pity especially because as before, the actual play choices rarely feel like they're very meaningful.  Only with the complexity there's less a feeling of mental prediction on what of the few offered plays your opponent is going to do.  It does at least mostly hide that from you.  Indeed, sometimes I'm not even sure what play  I selected, much less my opponent.  Not that it hindered my repeated destruction of enemy teams, both on the field and bone by bone tearing apart.

It offered this injury system in it that was kind of weird.  Instead of cartoony football violence, we got "Not only are you hitting the guy hard, you're trying to disable his  players permanently from the game!"  I dunno, the motif worked, but it didn't appeal to me as a narrative choice and it made the game feel a lot more meanspirited.

The game had a skip cutscene button.  Strange design, I thought... But in reality a critical component of the game because your players consistently have to talk trash.  In cutscenes.  Like every other play.  And without it each game session takes twice as long.  Strangely THESE don't really have load times.  Weird as that sounds, anyhow.  At the least, this rendered the whole smacktalk unobtrusive and easily movable out of my kicking their ass directly way.  I appreciated that.  It was nice of them.

Overall, a piece of crap.  Go play the origiinal blitz.  Odds are you can FINISH a game before Blitz:the League starts one =P

Dracos

[Dracos]

So, this got exactly 7 minutes of gameplay from me.    Take from that what you will.

Deep Labryinth I got because I recall hearing almost solely bad things about.  Well, maybe one or two not so bad things, but I could be mixing it up with others.  It was apparently, as my research indicates, a cell phone game that got ported and improved for the DS.  I'm not sure there was a real budget there because despite the 3dness, it feels kind of halfassed, indeed starting with a fairly lame animation with poor synching and poor flow.  It feels like I was watching an animation from the eighties.  The early eighties, like before Thundercats.  That kind of thing.

The game swiftly provides you a narrative of expressive and purposeful reasons you're in a labryinth complete with details on your transformation from a six year old boy to an experienced dungeon crawler with sword and shield and magical spells.  It pulls you in quickly with this narrative...  so quickly, it seems as if it almost forgot the narrative entirely.  Which, for the most part it did.  In actuality, the game gives a cockney enter a mystery house and get teleported to an odd world entrance (no problem) with the little boy getting caught inside looking for his parents.  The fact that a sword, shield, and magic almost instantly enter your repetoire without comment was more than a little strange with such a narrative entry.  The fact that you're only slightly odded by elephant headed gods appearing might possibly be ascribed to the six year old boy age of the character, but felt odd none the less.  The whole talk with the memory keeper was odd and sort of weakly written, less than would be hoped for in terms of integrating the saves into story.

 It appears that the other narrative the game offers (The original cell phone one) might be slightly more reasonable, but I doubt I'll head back to check.  I died shortly into it after killing a few strange slime creatures (They were there and yah...In genre) and then dying trying repeatedly to cast the new spell I got.  Not cool there and I can see why others mention that folks would only cast spells to escape the drugery of the whole thing.

It had a left handed mode.  That was pretty awesome.  A real left handed mode too, not a shitty one.  Even if it felt weird as hell using the other buttons as a left handed d-pad, it was at least leaps and bounds above other  left handed support I've seen.

Oh, what is the game, by the by?  It's a dungeon crawler.  Like Eye of the Beholder in the eighties or similar D&Dish games.  First person throughout the experience with the directional pad moving you around and your stylus slashing to kill enemies.  A bit neat on the interface, but nothing to really draw one into the experience.  Which is funny because Masato Kato (FF12) and whatnot is cited on the game dev team as brought in for his masterful ability in that area.

Anyhow, as the other shorties, staying away would be my rec.  But I only gave it eight minutes anyway =p