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The Digital Duelist, Volume 3
Pook at E3!
5.25.05 - By Pook 

Greetings, all. Sorry I haven’t been around much lately, but I can assure you I return with good news. Last week in Los Angeles, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 was held and yours truly got to attend (and man, was it amazing). I’ve wanted to go to this conference for years, and I finally got the chance to go. So I figured that while I was there, I’d check out what Konami has for us duelists in the way of video games. It turns out…not a whole lot.

The Konami booth was, well, a bit of a letdown. Their big marketing push was Dance Dance Revolution. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a big DDR player, but I wanted a little more. I did get to try out Karaoke Revolution Party, which incorporates both singing from Karaoke Revolution, as well as dance steps from DDR. But that aside, there was one reason I was at that booth – Yu-Gi-Oh. And I found it, but only one game – Nightmare Troubadour for the Nintendo DS.

I actually got to play the game on one of the setups there, but only for about 3 minutes – it was a big show, and I had to see everything. I step up to the DS, and immediately, I’m lost. The top scene shows me very little information, and the bottom screen has a top-down view of a map, and a moving colored cursor. Luckily, one of the people from Konami came my way. The guy explained to me that you have to find duelists in the bottom map by moving the cursor around down. When the blue cursor turns green, you’re close, and when it is purple, you’re very close. When I was a kid, I liked hide-and-seek, but now, I just wanted to get to the dueling. Finally, I found Kaiba, but he was hiding out in a farm. No joke.

The cool thing about when I challenged the computer Kaiba was that it told me what kind of deck he was using at that moment – an XYZ deck to be precise. This leads me to believe that the more you play and advance, the more characters’ decks will change, making them more of a challenge, and hopefully more accurate to the anime. By the way, the game boosts over 1000 cards, but it still stands to be seen what makes the cut and what doesn’t. So I started the duel, and I couldn’t figure out how to do anything but view my cards. The top screen had the impressive 3D environment of the dueling arena, and the bottom/touch screen had the top-down look of previous GBA games. But yeah, I was having no luck figuring out how to set a card. Again, Konami-man came to my rescue, showing me that the left hand side of the touch screen had all of the commands. Once I saw this, I realized that this is a great idea, because one of the issues with the GBA games was that you had to press A to bring up the actions, and you could easily do something to a card you didn’t really mean to do. So I highlighted my Magic Jammer, used the stylus to press “Set”, and there it went. The same thing for my Giant Soldier of Stone. What happened next? Well, it was time to go. Like I said, there was a lot to see.

So what are my initial impressions of the game? First off, the touch screen is going to make the gameplay go so much faster. While I was stupid for a moment, that quickly went away. I also really liked the 3D field on the top screen, as well as the fact that I knew what kind of deck I was facing off against right from the get go. I didn’t like the concept of having to search for duelists. I hope that once you find and defeat someone, you can easily find them again, without having to explore. Unfortunately, there was a lot more to the game that I couldn’t get into, such as the WiFi gameplay, and how to set up and select decks. I guess I’ll just have to wait until the game comes out. Yes, I will be buying it, but then again, I buy most Yu-Gi-Oh games. I do think it would be cool to have a Sony PSP game with insane graphics, but there are no plans that I know of right now. So there you go – Nightmare Troubadour is good enough for now. Hope this proved to be insightful.

And don’t forget to check out “The Millennium Quest” story, only on Pojo. It’s not so much a fanfic as it is a historical-fantasy novella. Expect the story to start to unfold quickly, but don’t count on this being a “duel to save the world” kind of story – this is more of a way for you to re-examine the world you live in. Until next time, happy dueling!