THE EYE OF JUDGMENT- FREE CARD FRIDAY RESULTS [Official PlayStation Blog - Thanks Velglarn!]

THE EYE OF JUDGMENT- FREE CARD FRIDAY! [Official PlayStation Blog]

EYE OF JUDGMENT Tip: How to Build a Deck [Playstation.blog]

I think that this price reduction, coupled with my hopes of uber tank awesomeness making its way to PSN, will cause me to drop some cash later today.

Eye of Judgment [Amazon via CheapAssGamer]

This Eye of Judgment schwag isn't just neat, it actually is useful. Sony sent me a black faux leather sack and a metal card carrying case. You put your Eye of Judgment deck in the case and then slip the case into a tiny pocket sewn into the sack. I assume you put the head of your defeated enemy in the rest of the bag after the game... or maybe it's for carting around the camera, stand and playfield. Neah, its gotta be for the heads.

As you can see, my copy of the card sucks. I printed it out on my little $50 Canon IP1800 photo printer, which I use so rarely that it took me a good half hour to find the USB cable to hook it up. Once I had the printout in hand, I headed over to the game. I thought about cutting the card out of the paper, but in the end it didn't really matter.

Here we see the Biolith Bomber, easily scanning into the game despite the poor quality of the printout. The camera resolution is relatively low, so the symbols on the card need to be easily recognizable. Unfortunately this also makes them easily to duplicate as well.

Just to make sure, I registered the card with my online deck. Worked like a charm.

So what does this mean? Well for me, nothing much. I'm a collector, so I'll be buying cards no matter what. For the general public, however, I predict it is only a matter of time before hi-rez card scans appear for download on the web. Cards still have to follow game rules, however, so it shouldn't affect gameplay at all. The main effect will be seen by Sony and Wizards of the Coast, who make the cards and boosters. What looked like a lucrative endeavor might end up with more money in the pockets of printer cartridge manufacturers than anyone else. Hopefully measures can be taken to enhance the copy protection in the future. For right now, there's nothing special about the ink here whatsoever.

As a final note, don't do this. We sincerely do not recommend that anyone obtain cards this way. It makes you a dick...unless done for demonstration purposes, of course.

Gabe and Tycho are Eye of Judgment savants. The two have been obsessing over the game since they played it in San Diego at Comic Con earlier this year.

So when they read that I had the game set-up in my gaming room, Tycho pinged me to see if I'd like to play a match. Which was great, because I'm working on a review of the game and really wanted to get more of a taste for the online play, besides what I'd seen playing it against the Sony rep.

Match one ended quickly, the cards barely used as Tycho handed me my ass in the game. The next week, yesterday in fact, Tycho asked if I was up for another game. Sure, I said. Great, we'll set up a game...

We?

Oh, Tycho forgot to mention that Gabe, master of the Pokedeck, was joining him in the pwnage. They play coop you see, sitting around their table wearing velvet robes, I suspect, plotting my demise and cackling over my misfortunes.

I tried a little idle smack talk before we launched into our second match, this one powered by a deck I had recently built just for the occasion. The game was even shorter, and results even juicier in pwnage. Dammit.

While I can't decide if this is a game that will maintain my interest, it's certainly one that has captured it momentarily and it's not because of the visual gimmicks.

Eye of Judgment is a solid strategy game, one built around a pretty distinct yet easy to grasp set of rules. You could, with a little effort, probably play this identical game without the help of a high-def camera, game disc and Playstation 3, but there's something almost mystical about sitting down in front of a table and laying out cards that are almost immediately recognized by the console and then brought to life on the television.

Once I found the right settings for my camera, I had no problems at all with card recognition, though I do have a very well lit room.

The game is played in rounds, with each player taking turns first drawing a card and then using mana to use a card on the field or place one there. When a creature card is placed on the field it attacks in the direction indicated on the card. The field itself is broken into nine two-sided rectangular tiles. Each of these tiles are randomly assigned different elements for each side. The cards also have elements. Depending on how you place the card, your creatures can get health bonuses, deductions or be left alone. The object of the game is to capture and hold five tiles.

There are some odd rules, for instance there is a casting lock that won't allow you to summon up the typically powerful Biolith creatures until there are a total of four creatures on the field. Other creatures are destroyed when placed on the wrong tile and some can be forced to attack your own creatures. Learning these nuances is what gives the game such legs, I think.

Of course winning in the game is really all about building a deck and knowing how to use it. In Eye you use the camera, or can, to build your deck, placing four cards at a time down on the mat. The camera auto recognizes them and adds them to your deck. One little hitch is that if you place an illegal combination of cards in your deck, like two many of a limited type, it just doesn't allow it but doesn't explain why or which card was disallowed. That's not a huge deal, but it can be a little annoying.

Sony went to great lengths to prevent cheating it seems. No, you can't color copy cards and then use them in the game, I've been told. And all of your online decks need to be verified with the camera. The console also auto draws your cards for you while playing online to prevent cheating.

The games graphics are interesting, the battle animations aren't so much, but I think the fun of the thing is the fact that you're using so much technology in such a different way.

I found that after the first few matches I actually turned off the battle animations, I didn't want to have to sit through them. But I still like playing the game.

I get frustrated with the occasional connection errors, something only I seem to be experiencing, but I still play the game.

I hate that the camera cord isn't long enough to reach the table where I have the game set up, that I have to put a weight on the camera stand to keep it from flipping off the table. But I still play the game.

The whole thing, the camera, the stand, the cards, the playing mat, is a big mess of equipment I have to store somewhere. But I still play the game.

I don't see Eye of Judgment becoming a smash hit, it's not meant to be, but for those of us who like strategy games, who like card games, Eye of Judgment is a whole lot of fun.

OK boys and girls prepare to watch me have my ass handed to... me.. by a Sony guy. Stay tuned to watch it live and comment. OK it's working again.

The official PlayStation Blog provides a quick technical rundown of the microphone-equipped Eye, promising "upcoming games that integrate the Eye in really innovative ways." I'm hoping that developers take advantage of that 4-microphone array and explore new PlayStation Eye gameplay concepts that go beyond what the EyeToy offered.

PlayStation Eye, A Little More Info... [PlayStation.blog]

I'm really enjoying Eye of Judgment so far, but my review and impressions remain under embargo. While I can't write about my latest time with the game, I can post this lovely close-up of an Eye of Judgment card, just so you can get a sense of what they look like and how they work. Hit the jump for the explanation.

The numbers on the left from top to bottom show his casting cost and cost to have him attack when already summoned, then his hit points and his attack points. That little cluster of cards with a one under the attack number means that there can only be one card of this "race" in the deck. In this case a Cai-Shae.

The icon on the right side that looks a bit like a pyramid shows which element this card belongs to (there are four), in this case it is fire. That gold diamond below that shows which card set this card belongs to and its rarity.

The two series of boxes at the bottom of the car shows its defense zone and attack zone. In this case the right set of boxes shows that Didi attacks directly in front of him when placed. The left set of boxes shows where Didi can defend himself when attacked.

Those odd grey symbols on the top and bottom of the card? I'm not positive, but if I had to guess I'd say they are what the camera reads to detect which card has been played.

Sure I've got a retail copy of Halo 3, but I've already finished that fight and the multiplayer co-op, that can wait for a bit. The thing that made me squeal a bit in excitement was opening up a box to find an early build of Eye of Judgment complete with the new camera, stand, playing field and two packs of cards.

Not only can I not wait to play around some more with this game (remember, I do have "skills"), but I'm even more excited about totally blowing my son's mind when he sees it the first time. He's going to trip out.

The stand comes packed away in a smallish plastic bag and was fairly easy to put together, though it's not the sort of thing you're really going to way to take apart and put together over and over again. I think I would have preferred if they had made it collapsible instead of takeapartable.

The camera looks and feels pretty solid. It has a four microphone array. You can twist the lens, switching between a red and blue selection on the front of the lens. I'm not positive what this does but think it's either for switching between auto and manual focus or, more likely, between distance and close-up focus. If you couldn't tell, none of this stuff came with directions.

I can't review the game until mid October, so you'll have to make do with what I've written about the game in the past, which is that I love it.

Eye of Judgment Online Impressions [Kotaku]

Eye of Judgment may end up sucking up a lot of space at your house once you get it, but it sure does solve a whole lot of the problems with Online Trading Card Games.

The problem it solves, at least for me, is finding someone who can play a trading card game with me when I want to, where I want to without sacrificing the satisfaction of holding honest to god cards in your hands.

That sounds like a minor point, the fact that you get real cards, but it isn't. For people like me, for a lot of people I bet, the joy of card games are the cards. Once you get rid of those and replace them with digital images and online stats you might as well be playing an elaborate game of bullshit. And don't tell me that you can't cheat in online trading card games, that doesn't matter, because you can't fondle your cards either.

I need to hold the cards in my hand when I play. Tap them on the desk as I think over strategy.

Eye of Judgment gives you all of that. It also gives you fancy graphics, making you feel like you're not playing a game but, perhaps, really summoning up monsters and making them fight for your pleasure.

On top of that the game's basic rules is simple in a cunning, chess sorta way. OK, chess is really overstating it, but I think checkers would be underselling the way the game works.

Both you and your opponent play on the same single three-by-three board. To win the game you need to capture five of the nine squares, by laying out your creatures on them and keeping them alive. Creatures attack automatically when you first put them down. The amount of damage they inflict and where they inflict it is described on the cards. So some creatures might, for instance, do damage only to the space directly in front of them. Others might damage the space in front, to the right and to the left. Other could do damage only to a space two away from them or even anywhere.

Because of this, the direction you face a card when you lay it down is very important. It's also important to keep an eye on the land type of both the space and your card. There are five types of spaces and if you lay your card on their matching space, like wood, earth or fire, they get a bonus. Laying on other types of spaces might just do nothing or even kill your card. Each space also has a second land type on the other side which comes into play with special cards that flip the space. So if you summon a fire creature onto a fire space which happens to be water on the other side and your opponent plays the space flipping card, your creature dies immediately.

As with most card games, you cast spells and summon creatures by using your mana. Once you summon a creature your turn is over and that creature automatically attacks their opponent if there is one in range. You can also use a mana point to have creatures already summoned perform an attack that turn.

That's pretty much it.

In the match I played, which was being played online with someone else on another PS3 at TGS, capturing four spaces (which is called Check), wasn't that hard, but landing that fifth space was quite hard. The game ended up lasting a full hour and though early on it looked like I was about to pull off a pretty surprising victory, I ended up losing. I knew I was going to lose about two moves before it happened and, barring a lucky draw, also knew there wasn't anything I could do about it.

The cool thing is that the knowledge of my imminent defeat didn't frustrate me. It was sort of like spotting something on a chessboard that you know will inevitably lead to checkmate in a game and not being able to stop it. It leaves you, typically, with the feeling of a game well played.

The new Dragon Quest arcade game from Square-Enix isn't likely to see much exposure, if any, outside of Japanese arcades as the card-based gaming scene is strongest there. But this trailer, overly dramatic though it may be, makes it look just thrilling to play. With the card-buying revenue stream surely to make greedy executives drool with profit hunger worldwide, I wouldn't be surprised to the see home-based card readers make their way onto store shelves over the next few years.

What do you think? Would a card-reader for the Wii or EyeToy-based game like Eye of Judgment for the PLAYSTATION 3 catch on? Michael McWhertor

I wasn't that bad honestly, but to this day I still get an itchy wallet whenever I see a new CCG come out. In this room I see at least $200 worth of World of Warcraft cards, and I've only actually played the game once.

So when you combine an innovative video game concept with the makers of the most addictive card game ever created, you pretty much get me in an alleyway behind a game shop promising 'favors' in exchange for rare cards.

I am so, so very doomed. Michael Fahey

Hasbro Lends Trading Card Leadership and Expertise to Sony Computer Entertainment's THE EYE OF JUDGMENT for PLAYSTATION 3

Collaboration Between Two Companies to Deliver Ground-Breaking Next-Generation Trading Card Gameplay Experience

PAWTUCKET, R.I.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Hasbro, Inc. (NYSE: HAS) announced today that it is working with Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. on the trading card component of the highly innovative THE EYE OF JUDGMENT game for the PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3 ) computer entertainment system. The global relationship, which covers Japan, Europe, the U.S. and Asian markets, taps Hasbro's core expertise in trading card games through its Wizards of the Coast subsidiary. Wizards of the Coast holds a patent on trading card games and the methods by which they are played and also produces MAGIC: THE GATHERING , the world's premier trading card game. Under the agreement, Hasbro will create, manufacture and distribute the trading cards associated with THE EYE OF JUDGMENT video game.

THE EYE OF JUDGMENT presents a new style of gameplay where the player brings creatures of trading cards to life for battle in 3D. Through use of a 3 x 3 board and trading cards, each encrypted with CyberCode, players conquer the field by selecting a card and placing the coded card in front of the PLAYSTATION Eye for their respective creatures to come to life and battle. Each creature has various skills which will determine the outcome of the battle. Players take turns placing cards as they jostle for control of the board; the winner is the first player to conquer five of the nine fields.

"We are very excited to enter into a collaboration with Sony Computer Entertainment on trading cards for THE EYE OF JUDGMENT which will deliver a ground-breaking entertainment experience that uniquely blends the global popularity of traditional trading card games with next-generation video games," said Phil Jackson, Group Executive of Hasbro Games. "Together we're creating a virtual world that brings fantastic trading card-based creatures to life for unprecedented interactive battles that will appeal to millions of fans around the world. It is innovation at its best."

"THE EYE OF JUDGMENT represents a totally new genre in gaming," said Phil Harrison, Corporate Executive, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and President, SCE Worldwide Studios. "Combining Hasbro's clear market leadership in trading card games with the immense power of PLAYSTATION 3 and PLAYSTATION Eye, is a powerful formula that will result in a revolutionary video game experience that will amaze and engage gamers around the world."

THE EYE OF JUDGMENT is slated for release in fall 2007. The game has already received early accolades from media around the world as well as a prestigious Japan Game Award in the "Futures" division held at last year's Tokyo Game Show.

###