Price: £29.99 Players: 1 Have you seen Yu-Gi-Oh!, the cartoon? Usually on at some crazy hour in the morning but it's great - loads of monster battles with little kids - kind of like pokemon with evilness!!! Well this game is the latest in a long series of Yugi games. Other Yugi games have been simpler with just a list of people to battle and no looking round for people, but the idea of this one is the same. However, you see your little guy, run him round the screen and challenge who you want to to gain experience and cards for your deck. The instruction booklet for this game does very little for you and basically is no use whatsoever! but once you get the basic idea of the game it isnt too hard. Primarily, you start out with a basic deck of cards (people used to card-battling games will pick it up really quick) most of which are crap, that's why you challenge the little people first (i.e. not the named characters). Battle these people to gain experience points and with each battle you will win one random card from the other player depending on what card you wager at the start of the match - wager a good card, get a good one back, wager a rubbish card expect to get the same back! Each card you have in your deck (each deck must contain only 40 cards - no more, no less) has a different cost to put in the deck and you have a certain limit to the total cost you can have in your hand - however, with each apponent you beat, you will be given a reward of more capacity for your deck - usually 5 or 10 points to start with. Gain a bigger deck cost value and you can change your poor cards for ones of greater ability or strength but always watch you dont go over your cost limit as it wont let you battle - it can be quite tricky to start with as theres loads of cards you want to use but simply can't put them in your deck as they cost too much to use!

The ultimate goal is to beat the world champion to be the best and you can't take place in the tournament until you beat the 6 named characters to get their locator cards - you can only enter with the 6 locator cards. Battles can take a long time or short time and mostly its luck depending on if you have a good hand at the start. Each player in the battle (Ok, so that would be you and the guy your against as they're 2-player games) has 5 random cards from their deck in their hand, and each turn you play one monster card and as many magic or trap cards as you want. Then at the start of each turn you get one card added to your hand (as long as there's room). The idea is to battle the other guy to make him lose his 8000 life points - easier said than done in some cases as there's some kind of 'battle engine' thing that I still can't get the idea of, where a monster with 300 attack points can beat a monster of 2000 attack points - makes no sense - but hey! each monster has a different ability - water, fire, darkness, light etc. and each monster is more vulnerable to monster types opposite to itself - i.e. fire vulnerable to water.

The game has pretty annoying music like most advance games which gets annoying but its simple enough to turn the volume off and put some decent music on in the back ground. Graphically there's no fantastic monster battle scenes like you can find on the PS1 and PS2 Yugi games, it's just a simple "Oh, this card beats this one and it bursts into flames and is gone!", but the little dude running around is a good twist as simple card battles over and over again is a bit repetetive and boring. You can buy and sell cards in the local card shops and there's a whole town to go round and explore with different enemies - its best to start around your home city because the opponents arent too good there and progress as you feel ready. Battling is a bit slow, having to wait for the other players speech - which is totally unnecessary between every single turn - but all in all, the game's really good and quite addictive. Can you beat Yugi and be the champ?

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Review copyright © Kirsten, 2004.