There's a new PS3 game that actually does something new. Eye of Judgment (now I'm all for humouring Americans, but you really do need the E there guys or the word has to be said differently. It's how language works folks) is one of those card games that Wizards of the Coast make, but this time it's a really quite clever mix of cards, the Playstation Eye (a webcam) and image recognition. This type of card game is basically about selling cards to players as you get a random mix of cards in each booster pack. Although there's only 100 cards at the moment there will be inevitable expansions that add more and more over time, and you'll need to keep buying these in order to remain competitive in multiplayer. There's a slight problem though, the cards can be copied. Now this is going to be easy to detect in local multiplayer, and just hurts card sales for the single player the real problem is that it ruins multiplayer. Everybody can have the killer cards, you don't need to pay loads of money to be effective (which, if we're honest, is what most of these games come down to). That's the pickup multiplayer potentially ruined unless they can fix this.
The really best bit is on the second video on the sony site, which says "next generation technology of the Playstation Eye". Um, it's a webcam and they've been around for a while. That's what happens when you let marketing get near stuff I guess, they tend to exaggerate.
The videos also show local multiplayer, and although I think the idea is good I watched the video and the first thing that struck me was they really don't look like the need the console to play, they could have been playing any card game with some game running in the background.
I'm not sure if this game has a future, but I can see something like Magic getting online play this way in the future if they can fix the card copying issue.
posted @ Tuesday, October 30, 2007 11:23 AM