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Pojo's Vs.
Magic |
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Pook’s Review: Marvel Trading Card Game
By Pook
Greetings one and all. Although
this re
This game is frakkin’ hard.
Yes, you read that right. The
Marvel Trading Card Game for the Sony PSP (as well as the
Nintendo DS and PC) is very, very difficult. Now this isn’t
to say that I’m getting nowhere in the game, I’m just saying
that this game is providing me with an excellent challenge,
and because of this, I’m becoming a better player.
Let’s begin with the
single-player campaign. After the initial tutorial with
Professor Xavier, you have the option of choosing your
career path – hero or villain. It’s a little cut and dry,
and it would have been great to have some more depth to
this, much like how your affiliation is determined in the
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game – you actions
affect your path. But alas, all we get in this game is a
simple two-choice response. At this point in the game, I’m
about 5 chapters into the heroes’ path, and haven’t even
begun with the villains. From here, our game begins.
The hero starter deck is not
nearly as self-contained as it could have been. Your deck
is not based on any one of the real-life starter decks (i.e.
X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four) but sort of a mish-mash
of all three. It is primarily a
Spider-Friends deck, but there are a few X-Men and Fantastic
Four thrown into t
Since I was unable to build a
real deck at this point, I was getting beaten fairly often.
The majority of my victories were due to luck – perfect
draws or amazing come from behind victories. While this is
an important factor in the real life
game, at least you have the structure of your deck to fall
back on. The problem is that the game was handicapping me
too early. Thank goodness this did not last.
Each of the campaign chapters
have missions that go along with the story – the chapters
average somewhere between 6 to 8 missions, with 7 missions
for each faction (quite a hefty single
player mode, considering some missions contain up to 4
battles!). The missions tend to start with you facing off
against nameless thugs, leading up to more
familiar rivals. Doc Ock destroyed me about a half-dozen
times before I was able to defeat him. The nice thing is
that these deeds do no go unrewarded. Aside from receiving
points to p
As you can tell, the
single-player mode is incredibly deep, which is fantastic.
I just wish that it were easier to get the cards I’m looking
for. Like I said before, the packs aren’t based on real
life counterparts, but on top of that, certain cards are
unlocked during the hero path, which the other half are in
the villains set, meaning that I’ve not even collected 50%
of every possible card. Oh well, replay value is a strong
aspect of a video game.
Then we come to multiplayer. I
have been staying away from multiplayer for the most part
due to the fact that you have to pay for your packs (please
see my previous article for my pre-launch thoughts on
that.) Now I did buckle and buy a few packs, mostly just as
trade fodder so that I could build a solid deck. The
multiplayer game is even bigger than the single player game,
mostly due to the fact that the X-Men expansion set is part
of it (whereas Avengers is the latest set in one-player
mode), and there are many sorts of gameplay, including
constructed and sealed tournaments. I haven’t participated
in any tournaments yet, but that’s mostly due to my lack of
competitive deck. Now the ranked games are not without
their problems – mostly due to connection errors. I have
been in a game where my prompt says “Waiting for other
player”, and my opponent has the game message. There is no
way to quit out without getting a forced loss, but Konami
has been addressing this situation, trying to fix it so that
if that is the problem, the result is a tie. Frankly, that
stinks.
The other major issue (aside from card
glitches…::cough cough::Dr. Long story short, this game is very deep. Yes, it has it’s flaws, but I am learning so much from it. The single player AI will occasionally make a boneheaded move, but I’m getting to see a lot of different deck types in action (Crime Lords and Masters of Evil? Who plays those?). I’ve got a Fantastic Four deck that’s pretty solid, and I’m still building a Spider-Friends/Marvel Knights deck that isn’t perfect, but very playable. Mostly, what this game is for me is the teacher I never had. It’s funny, because this is the same way that I got better at playing Yu-Gi-Oh – I used the GBA games as my teacher, since it knew all of the rules and could offer me consistent challenges. The tutorials make the game accessible for new players, but the matches and puzzles will make even a seasoned veteran sweat. Overall, it’s a solid game that will keep you busy for a long, long time. On top of that, the game comes with an extended art Armageddon card, and that in itself is worth having. I’ll give this game a 7.8 out of 10. Until next time.
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Copyright© 1998-2005 pojo.com This site is not sponsored, endorsed, or otherwise affiliated with any of the companies or products featured on this site. This is not an Official Site. |
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view
may seem a little bit late, I was determined to get this to
the viewing public once I had gotten my hands on the very
first VS related video game. With that being said, here’s
my one sentence review (borrowing some
slang from Battlestar Galactica along the way).
he
mix, without any team up cards. This means right out of the
gate, you are at a disadvantage.
However, you won’t be fighting with this deck for too long.
With the progression of each new
chapter, a new pack is unlocked in the Card Store. Packs
are 100 points, and after a few victories against
street thugs, you’ll have enough points to buy a few packs
at least. The biggest downside of the packs is that they
are not based on any of the real life packs (meaning you
could get cards from just about any set early on), and you
are not guaranteed a rare card in each pack. From the first
set alone, I had character cards from nearly every major
team, and not enough of one team to build a focused deck.
For the most part, I would just swap in cards here and there
with ones in my starter. 
urchase
cards, occasionally you will win a card as well. It’s based
on who you are battling, so a win
against Doc Ock will give you a Doc Ock card. It’s very
satisfying to get a free card this way. You will also
unlock multiplayer avatars by winning, but with over 100 to
unlock, it can get old fast. Upon completion of a chapter,
you can unlock multiplayer playmates (which are so much
cooler than avatars), as well as puzzles. These puzzles are
themed (i.e. Boost, Evasion, etc.) and you unlock a complete
set of puzzles at once. These puzzles are a fantastic way
to earn big points, flex your mind, and frustrate the crap
out of you. I know that Konami said that they were very
proud of the puzzles they included in this game, but I can
not tell you how hard some of the higher level ones can be.
I will stare at the PSP for what feels like forever trying
to figure some of these out, and for the life of me, I will
be flat out stumped. Luckily for me, I’m not the only one,
and people on different message boards seem to be helping
everyone out. But wow, these are doozies!
Doom::cough cough::) is the play timer. Yu-Gi-Oh online had
a play timer, so that people could not exploit others and
just sit forever doing nothing, forcing people to get
frustrated and quit, as well as keeping the game flowing,
but the timer is, for lack of a better word, reasonable. I
was playing a multiplayer game and I was using a tutor card,
searching my deck for another card, and all of a sudden, I
got a game loss. Turns out I only had 45 seconds to go
through my entire deck to find the card I wanted. Now this
isn’t a big deal if you know exactly what card you want, but
sometimes, when you are thumbing through your deck, you’ll
see that there is actually a better card to use, one you
hadn’t thought of before, and decide to pick that instead.
Unfortunately, the timer completely hinders this, and I
suffered for that. The lesson learned is know what you want
ahead of time. Oh well.