The Eye of Judgment - hands-on

As enjoyable as the Battle Arena game is, though, it's not the coolest thing about Eye of Judgment; it doesn't, for example, let you pick up your cards and move them around in front of the camera, or just slap down a couple of cards and make them fight. So you might end up spending more time with the Judgment and Card Profile modes. Both enable you to put down up to four creature cards at a time, and - once the camera reads them and the monsters pop out - you can look at them from nearly any angle, in real time, just by rotating the cards or turning them on their sides (sadly, the monsters didn't react when we poked at them). You can also push them around to face each other, at which point they'll sometimes start taunting or attacking.

It's only in Judgment mode that your cards can actually fight each other, however. Unfortunately, it doesn't let you watch their battle animations - instead, it just counts down from three and then briefly "kills" the creature(s) who would have lost in a fight. So Judgment is really more of a curiosity and a way to test your cards' battle-worthiness than anything else.

Despite its boring-ass name, the Card Profile mode is actually a little more interesting. It's essentially the same as Judgment, except that instead of fighting, you can stick your cards under a little floating crosshairs and read their stats and backstories. You can also see which part of the game's fictional world they come from, which is sure to be interesting to the thousands of trivia-hoarding pedants this sort of thing appeals to.

But we kid the game. The Eye of Judgment is a pretty stunning achievement for console technology, and it's got us excited to see what other sorts of things the PlayStation Eye will be able to do. Expect a full review when this hits stores in October.