Robot Claw

The Eye Of Judgment is a new game for the Playstation 3 that uses the Playstation Eye camera to allow us to play a CCG (collectible card game) on the system while using real cards. To understand what I mean, take a look at these shots:

The rightmost shot shows it the best. The device perched on the left side of the white table in front of me is the Playstation Eye camera. It is looking directly down onto a 3 x 3 grid onto which the game itself is played. When I place my cards on that grid, the camera scans them and places a card on the grid in the game itself, which is what’s happening on the TV.

In these shots I’m playing online against someone. If you look at the screen you’ll see some squares have units in them that are empty on my table – that’s because on his table, wherever in the world he’s playing, he’s got cards down on those squares. The goal of the game is to occupy 5 of the 9 squares. And with 110 different cards, with all sorts of different strengths and weaknesses and various strategies, the game is deliciously complex.

Much like ‘real’ CCGs, you improve your deck by buying booster packs of real cards. Which can then be used in the game. Here’s a picture of one card:

< Ouroboros Dragon The strange black bars on the top and bottom of the card are the barcode picked up by the camera (so it knows what I am playing). The green squares allow it to align which direction the card is facing (direction is important in the game). Unfortunately there is no 'copy protection' on the cards, so anyone can photocopy and print them and the game wouldn't know you were using a fake. But simply owning the cards is nothing if you don't know how to use them. Furthermore,  the computer controls the draw in online games, so cheating isn't possible. It's a very fun game (of course two can play offline as well) with speedy play and very, very nice graphics. It seems to be quite a success so far as well, if the inability to find boosters in the stores is any indication.

If you have a PS3 and this game, let me know and we’ll duel together!

The other day I bought one of the new model Playstation Portables (PSP), the ‘Piano Black’ version.

Very little has changed, as you can see from these comparison shots (courtesy Famitsu), in which the new model is at the top:

The new model, which everyone now calls the PSP Slim, is a little bit thinner, and more than a little lighter. While the changes look (and are) subtle, the end result is a unit that is more comfortable to hold and play, especially for long periods. Furthermore, the PSP Slim has more onboard memory and the OS now has built in UMD-caching which means load times are reduced, in some cases significantly. The screen seems a little better as well. I did comparison between my two PSPs and the shadowing on the new screen seems less noticeable.

I also have zero dead/stuck pixels on my new screen, which is 2 or 3 less than my old PSP 🙂

My conclusions? Well, if you have an old PSP (and I think only one person reading this does) then this is only worth the upgrade if you play it a great deal. Furthermore, the battery life of this unit is actually less than the old model due to a smaller battery (which can be expanded with an additional purchase). The addition of TV out capabilities is meaningless to me, so I’m not factoring that in.

If you don’t even have a PSP, does this new model warrant buying one? In a word, “No”. The PSP is still an answer in search of a question. Sony continues to muddle the marketing (games are listed fourth on the box) and the fact that they have not yet abandoned the foolish proprietary UMD disc format is a sign they don’t seem serious about the future of the system.

Great games do exist (for instance, Monster Hunter 2 and Jeanne D’Arc both came out in the last month), and many others are on the way. So it’s not as simple to dismiss the PSP as bereft of good games. But at the same time we only has so much free time, and handheld gaming time is much better spent these days with the vastly superior DS Lite.

(Unless your a total game maniac like myself, who now owns not one but two PSPs…)

Ok, so the title is the name of a real arcade game Capcom released some years ago. But I’m co-opting here because of something I found this past weekend.

Through a secret source, I came into possession of two old issues of Dragon magazine, one from 1992 and one from 1986. Each are fascinating reads, an absorbing glimpse into the history of RPGs, and one into an era in which MMORPG’s (such as World Of Warcraft) hadn’t killed the industry.

< Dragon 117, January 1986 For those that have followed AD&D over the years (such as myself) these magazines are also an interesting look at how the game once was. More of a roll-playing game than a role-playing game, each issue is full of all sorts of charts and tables that allowed the GM to basically randomize everything (such as the wind speed and temperature of a cyclone...). Diehards back in those days seemed to embrace such an approach, perhaps even celebrate it. Therefore the following quiz, taken from the pages of Dragon 117, may very possibly have seemed a little less absurd to the readers of the day then it does to us now? < Can you answer Q10? I also obtained, from the same source, the rulebook (all 14 pages...) of a 1980 TSR sci-fi RPG named Star Frontiers: < Is that Chewbacca on the right? Believe me when I say it's as awful as it looks 🙂