The best arcade games like Blitz The League are NFL Blitz, Blitz: The League II and NBA Jam: On Fire Edition. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to arcade costs you.
Filtering to arcade means you want short runs and a score, not a campaign. It is the right filter when what you liked was the one-more-go feeling.
What you get: A complete experience in twenty minutes, and a skill you keep. Arcade design is measured in the moment after you lose.
What made Blitz The League worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the arcade part of that answer, and only the arcade part.
The arcade original, and the purest version of the idea.
The sequel, more of everything, and the better-playing of the two.
The same studio's philosophy applied to basketball.
The spiritual successor, made by people who missed this exactly.
EA's arcade take, and unusually good.
The other great arcade sports game of that console generation.
If the punishment rather than the sport was the appeal.
Racing with the fighting kept in.
Arcade-leaning sport that still plays properly.
Story and progression. Arcade games repeat on purpose, and if you want to be pulled somewhere they will not do it.
The full list is on games like Blitz The League — 9 picks, no genre filter.
NFL Blitz. The arcade original, and the purest version of the idea.
No. Blitz The League released on the PlayStation 2, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
They were designed to end. A machine that let you play for an hour on one coin did not earn its floor space, so difficulty was the business model.
Constantly, mostly by small teams. Several of the best beat-em-ups and run-and-guns of the last decade are new games built on forty-year-old design rules.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Blitz The League list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is arcade — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the arcade guide for where to start in the genre generally.