Making card games is easy. Unlike racing games or sports games, all you need to do is be more exciting than a piece of cardboard. Yet time and time again, games fall short of what you can find at your own kitchen table. The PSP has the technology to deliver not only every little piece of card porn a Yugi-lover could want, but the wireless connection to deliver hungry duelists to your home. Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Tag Force presents one of the best looking games of the series but fails to take advantage of anything else the PSP has to offer.
And for you Yu-Gi-Oh fans, you can equate that to using a Cyber-Stein to special summon a Rabid Horseman. Yeah, it’s pretty bad.
A RING OF DESTRUCTION
Welcome back to the Dueling Academy! Nothing says fun like having to actually go to class. Those of you not familiar with the new GX format, consider yourself lucky. GX takes the Yu-Gi-Oh brand and takes out all the over the top action by squeezing in a tween drama. As the newest member of this illustrious high school, you’ll rub cards with the series regulars and a maelstrom of generic deck toting students. Duel it out for duel points to buy more cards at the shop. Pull out the bad cards while assembling some sense of a strategy from the second rate cards you acquire from the game’s own personal card packs. Duel for more points. Stumble across loose semblances of plot points. Get more cards. Pretty simple and just like every other game.
As you could imagine, anything new in this one sided duel seems a bit revolutionary for the series even if it’s something as simple as readable text. Yes, the ability to read all the text on a given card without having to use a magnifying glass. Anything that speeds up a duel gets a gold star in my book. The rest of the graphics reflect the series well, but these nothing that stands out. Duels lacking actual fight animation may be seen as both a blessing and a curse – shortening duel times while making for a rather dull game.
MY DATE WITH A 15-YEAR OLD BOY
Back when I was fifteen, a copy of Star Wars and Double-stuffed Oreos meant that I was yours for the night. My, how things have changed. Today’s barely-legals need attention – constant attention. You’ll need to talk to them three to four times a day. About what? The same three or four subjects that they may or may not randomly like to talk about. Talk is cheap. Food is expensive. Once you pick something up from the roulette of nosh, you’ll find that today’s kids are rather finicky eats as well. Look up their preferences on the school website before tempting their taste buds with a tofu sandwich. Throw on a dress and you’ll find one of the weirdest dating sims floating around the PSP. An awkward dance would be preferable to the newest type of duel – the Tag Duel.
Two teams of two duel it out one at a time as each character switches their deck with their turn. Take your turn and sit back. The computer will need time to duel itself. If nothing else, Tag Duels clearly demonstrates the games one-tack and often broken AI system. The computer will often attack the wrong monsters or clear their own board just to follow the simple rules programmed into its little bobble head.
A FEW STAPLES SHORT OF A FULL DECK
Sometimes it’s not what you have; it’s what you don’t have that breaks a game. Jaden’s internet reach only reaches as far as the official website. A few new cards flutter through along with new restrictions, but there’s no on-line play for this little game. The card machine only pops out three cards for a hefty rental fee put on every duel. At that point, you might as well remove the password system out of the game entirely. Remove the two or three extra slots used for extra decks and you’re looking at a pretty standard card playing game. Tag Force had a chance to reinvent itself and blew it by not adding in elements missing from the series and making room for extras that no one wanted in the first place.
