Bejeweled Blitz Live boasts two styles of play: classic and an all new twist.Release Date: Feb 23, 2011
Both of the most surprising announcements for this Winter's Xbox Live Arcade House Party promotion are visitors from the PC gaming kingdom. But, while 360 gamers have never seen a game like Torchlight on the platform, Bejeweled Blitz Live is a return appearance for that series - Bejeweled 2 was one of the first titles on the nascent Xbox Live Marketplace all the way back in 2006. At this year's CES I was able to get my hands on the controller with Bejeweled Blitz Live to see what Popcap and Microsoft have in store for 360 gamers next month.
In short, the answer seems to be madness, honestly. Bejeweled Blitz Live is divided into two game styles: Classic and Twist. Classic is the mode Bejeweled is known for: you swap sets of stones trying to match 3 or more gems of the same color. Blitz Live has a strange control setup though, one I never quite got used to in my short time with the game. Rather than selecting one stone with, say, the A button, then selecting an adjacent stone to switch their positions, also with the A button, each face button on the Xbox 360 controller represents a swap direction for the highlighted gem.
If you hit the Y button, your selected gem will switch places with the gem above it; if you press B, you'll switch your gem with the next stone to the right. X switches left, A switches down, and nothing switched off my pronounced confusion over this hyper specific control method. I think I get why it's set up this way - using an analogue stick to manually cycle through every gem on the board to make matches, then selecting a gem and then selecting another gem is time consuming and clunky. And this control scheme could help alleviate that. But the "standard" mode certainly wasn't as approachable right off as you would expect a game bearing the Bejeweled name to be.
Meanwhile, there's also Twist mode. In Twist mode, you can rotate any gems you want in groups of four squares (arranged two by two) right or left without restrictions. Rounds last 60 seconds, and you'll want to line up as many matches as possible in that time limit. This was easier to jump into than Bejeweled Blitz Live's "Standard" mode, but it... well, it didn't really feel like Bejeweled.
This non-Bejeweled feeling is amplified by the hyper-competitive Xbox Live modes for each game style, where you'll compete against other players for the highest score. Bejweled has always been a series that hinges on contemplation - it's a very Zen experience. Watching Avatar representations crawl up a playing field on the left side of the screen while rotating groups of gems, well, I just didn't feel like I was playing Bejeweled.
But, different doesn't necessarily equal bad, and I refrain from writing off Bejeweled Blitz Live after my confusing time with it. Popcap doni't make it a habit to release games that aren't approachable and fun. At the event, reps for the game were also stressing the multiplayer aspect of Blitz Live, which could either tilt the game into good territory or push it right off the deep end; we'll have to see. For now, I'll place my trust in Popcap and hope for the best, at least until I get my hands on a final version of the game.
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