PAX: Hands on with Eye of Judgment

Knock Sony and the PlayStation 3 all you want, but you have to give it to the company for taking chances on ideas and titles that it seems others might not have the foresight to capitalize on – games like Little Big Planet, Flow, and the upcoming MC Escher-inspired title Echochrome are just a few prime examples. The next “why didn’t anyone think of this before” title to appear on the forward-thinking PS3 is the card game Eye of Judgment.

Packaged with Sony’s innovative evolution of the Eye Toy, Eye of Judgment blends the world of collectible card games (Magic the Gathering and the smattering of others that flood any local game shop) with the interactive world of videogames.

But before you close this window and begin to think that card games have always been inaccessible to you – don’t worry, I always thought this too – you’re going to have to realize that the creators of Eye of Judgment are reading your mind. In a true sense of scalability, this PS3-only game is easy enough for a newbie to understand and deep enough for a hardcore snob to be sucked in like every other addicting game-related hobby.

As I said, the title ships with the Eye Toy which will sit perched upon a custom stand, staring over a custom-designed piece of cloth sporting a grid of nine boxes. Players will use this grid as their board in which to place specially-designed cards that the camera will capitalize on to read a unique bar code that the game will translate into action on the screen.

Essentially, instead of the action happening in your head in any typical card game or table-top RPG, the action happens in full-color 3-D directly on your screen. With a number of animations and possibilities (yes, booster packs will breed downloadable content), the game is amazingly fresh and amazingly addictive from the first time you plunk down a card.

In fact, out of everything on the show floor at PAX, the game that had me the most hooked in was Eye of Judgment. If it were not for the gaggle of mutants that consistently congregated around the five or so stations in the back of the exhibition hall, I would have planted myself at the game for an unhealthy amount of hours.

My only disappointment seems to be in the fact that I can’t play the game right this very second. Due out on Oct. 23, Eye of Judgment is enough of a genre bender as you can get in today’s “innovative” game landscape.

Besides the accessible gameplay, the title also does exactly what it should: make itself playable online. And just like you’re most likely asking yourself right now, yes, I too questioned the idea that a physical card game could remain honest in the world of online anonymity. Don’t worry, all bases have been covered. While playing at PAX, I grilled a developer on just about every idea my cheater’s mind could come up with. So far, it seems like every plausible seedy move is countered by the game’s designers.

Will this possibly hold up in a world of overwhelming dishonesty? As the cliché states, time will certainly tell. But, because it is online, it’s certainly nothing a little patch couldn’t fix.

Don’t be mistaken, this is not your cousin’s basement card game, this is a fully-functional and understated masterpiece that I can only hope breeds a new generation of games. If you’re ready to try something different this fall, you may have found your answer with Eye of Judgement. Now excuse me while I prepare my invasion to steal an early copy of this one.