So, Eye of Judgment arrived yesterday, and after a nice cold beer and some tasty pasta, it was time for the unboxing. Sadly, although this stage was particularly fun (as new hardware always is) and smelled fantastic, it proved to be the highlight. Once opened and assembled, the Eye itself mounted on the little frame, the excitement was almost tangible, but upon booting the game and being greated with the worse interface aesthetics we’ve seen since early Amiga games, things started to go downhill.
The setup process is simple enough, but the ugly menus and clunky navigation didn’t help, and we had to switch on every light we could find to make the camera actually pick up the cards (including the bathroom light, and that’s two doors away) and even with Blackpool illuminations above the mat the ‘I’ve picked up the card’ symbol was flickering on and off like a strobe. No amount of tweaking could fix the issue, but onwards we pushed, desperate to try the game itself anyway.
This of course meant that playing the actual card game would be pointless too, but we tried anyway. It faired slightly better because once the card was on the mat it wasn’t that bothered whether it could see it 60 times a second or not, but our fun here was cruelly interrupted by a total lack of knowledge on how to actually play the game – we’d have to break the cardinal rule of videogaming and actually read the manual. So, we’ll do that, play it some more and get back to you.
In the meantime, we managed to fight off all the people trying to download Ratchet and Clank and grabbed Eye Create (fantastic fun, and free), Aqua Vita (utterly pointless, but only two quid and would look nice on a wall mounted TV) and Trials of Topoq (which is far more complicated than it needs to be, and too expensive at £3.50). Still, it’s worth the £70 for Eye of Judgment just for Eye Create and the camera, kinda, and you still have 30 bits of card for roaches and stuff.