You are now just Some Jerk. Congratulations. Now make a blog about ponies.

On Dec 16, 2007 10:11 PM, <s0me_j3rkv2@sbcglobal.net > wrote:

Hey,

I'm currently posting on destructoid as some_jerk, and apparently the underscore in my name has hit destructoid's weakspot (presumably for massive damage) and nobody can read my blog. Is there any way you can perhaps take the underscore out of my name and unleash my blog as a form of punishment toward the public?



--
Hamza "CTZ" Aziz

Community Blogs Manager & Associate Editor for
Destructoid.com
Japanator.com

So, that being said, I guess now's as good a time as ever to introduce a regular feature I'll be calling...
Games You Didn't Buy Because You're Stupid
...until I can think up a better name.


Pictured above: $50 worth of unrelenting awesome

"Deathrow is a sports video game for the Xbox that was released on October 22, 2002, about 1 year after the release of the Xbox. The game was developed by Swedish developer SouthEnd Interactive and produced by Ubisoft Entertainment. Although the game’s sales were unspectacular, it won awards and reviewers applauded the game's uniqueness and character" if wikipedia is to be believed.

The game takes place in the year 2219. After a year of bloody, brutal and exciting exhibition matches of an underground sport combining hockey, rugby, frisbee and fighting, Blitz is greenlit for a 14 team championship tournament.


Pictured above: The banned 15th team, tested positive for not enough horse steroids

This tournament, and the "conquest" mode based around it, are the main meat of what makes Deathrow so great. Start out as a rag-tag group of cyber-modified official players, convicts, millitiamen, or providing you've unlocked them, ninjas, and work your way up to the championship. Along the way new players can be bought, bets can be made, and players can be experimented on with new steroids. Perhaps the best part is the event system, in which random crap happens in a sort of sports-management-sim way. Companies will offer you endorsement deals for doing well. Hackers can get into your team's bank account and steal a chunk of money. The star player might sleep with the mayor's twins, resulting in, well nothing other than some tabloid reports.


Pictured above: Motherfuckin' ninjas.

There are two ways to win a match. One, is to simply out-score your opponents with more disc shots into their floating, circular goal. The other, more fun way, is to simply beat down the entire team until they're unable to continue. The tem "deathrow" actually comes from throwing a fully charged disk shot at an opposing player so hard it knocks them out. There's no over-time, the only sudden death comes when you drop somebody from a particularly high platform onto their neck. The best analogy I could make for this game is to Blitzball from FFX, if you had control over the players in real time, it wasn't underwater, and didn't suck.


I never got past this part, mostly because I wanted to win and Letty is a pussy.

Despite featuring such x-box exclusive awesomeness as custom soundtracks, bump mapping, and profuse usage of the word "fuck" the game was never commercially successfull. So why didn't the best fake sports game since Mutant League Football not do so well financially? Perhaps it was the upped levels of gore, perhaps it was the lack of advertising, perhaps it was the dark humor. More likely it was because at the time the X-Box was known for T3H HALOZ and only said overrated (that's right, I said it) game.


Pictured above: A robot hook-kicking a genetically modified woman in the face, seriously, why don't you own this?

Still, this is one of those critically acclaimed games that for some reason gets looked over (see also: Psychonauts). If you can find it at a local store or on eBay and own an xbox I highly recomend you pick it up, if for nothing other than the intense matches against the team consisting entirely of demons or the amazingly well animated kick-combos of the Black Dragons.


You really don't want to know what happens when you turn safe-search off.

I leave you with the only known footage of Deathrow in the wild.