Timeball (TurboGrafx-16) review "It's not often that a game comes along that alters the fabric of reality. Games that make you look back at the favorites of yesteryear and say "those weren't so special after all". Games that pull you into an orgasm just at the very sight of the decorative cover. Yes, those games are rare indeed."

Blodia is a puzzle game. It is presented in an overhead view, set atop a grid of bland tiles. A grooved track runs through several of the tiles. There is one empty space. A ball rolls along the track, and you need to shift the tiles (taking advantage of the empty space) over and over, so that the ball will keep rolling until it reaches the END POINT. It's like one of those handheld puzzles — I forget the name of them — where you shift the tiles to form a picture, or to put the numbers in numerical order, or whatnot. Except that the tile-shifting in Blodia is slow and tedious, unlike those handheld puzzles.

The tiles are kind of a light blue/grey mixture. There are two music tracks that you can

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

Blodia is crap. I'm sorry, but I can't be bothered to play it again, nor can I be bothered to waste my time reviewing it. No matter what your expectations, it's a failure. Blodia isn't worth any price, not even a piddly three dollars — unless you bought it from me, in which case it was a wise purchase and I hope you're deeply satisfied. But for everyone else, it's just an utter pile, best left on eBay where a dozen ten-dollar copies go unsold on a weekly basis.

It's bad when a puzzle game fails to stimulate — at least half-assed porn hentai games like Ugai Puzzle offer quick-and-responsive tile movement, bright colors, and a legitimate (if naughty) reward for beating a map. The one reward for playing Blodia is pain. More and more pain.

Heck, the developers didn't even try to make this game good. There are only two music tracks (which is already a bad sign) but they couldn't even be bothered to name them properly. Instead of LABYRINTH, we get LABYLINTH. This lack of effort drives the nail even deeper... INTO MY FOREHEAD!

If anyone thinks this review is incomplete, if anyone thinks I haven't spoken enough about the game, then stay far far away from Blodia — because there isn't any more to it than that. The US localization, Timeball, has a cooler name but the game itself is just as bad bad bad.

Next!

//Zig

[Review by Zigfried. Power-edit by GUTS.]

Staff review by Zigfried (March 13, 2005) Zigfried likes writing about whales and angry seamen, and often does so at the local pub.