I’m a huge fan of new ways to video game. There’s only so much you can do with a simple handheld directional controller and a box, even with that e’er so seductive N64 Rumble Pack. So, I’ve thrilled to the Dance Dance Revolution gamepad, I’ve beat the hell out of the Donkey Konga bongos, I’ve rocked out in the middle of a crowded Best Buy with a Guitar Hero guitar strapped around my neck, and I’ve dragged my Nintendo DS stylus to touch-screen victory. I even played the ‘virtual reality’ Xavix bowling game until I was sore! Subsequently, I was excited to play Mattel’s new Hyperscan Gamer system, which seems to be a collector’s dream come true. Seems. Just like lions might seem like an awesome form of transportation, until they start eating your knees and you realize that cars are pretty great too. Or unicycles. Anything without teeth and a digestive system.

If you watch as many cartoons as I do, you’ve seen the (embarrassingly bad) commercials for the Hyperscan Gamer. Using the CD-based Hyperscan device, which has a unique RFID scanner built into it, a couple of simple controllers and a series of gamecards, the Hyperscan Gamer promised to be the next frontier in awesome-ocity, as well as rocking-out-ery. It involves collectible game cards, and fantasy violence - what more does a young lad need? After a few test runs with the console, I regret to report that while the console is theoretically stunning, the reality of the system is significantly less than awesome.

The basic idea is this : you scan your character card (available in ten dollar booster packs, sold separately) over the console’s RFID scanner when prompted to summon your fighter. If you don’t have your desired character’s card, you’re outta luck and you can’t use them in battle. You also have the opportunity to scan a couple of corresponding power cards to add to your character’s abilities, presuming that your chosen booster pack contains cards that match up to your character, and given the 100+ cards that make up the X-Men game alone, that seems statistically difficult. You can scan in a non-corresponding card to enhance your character, but I don’t think that the effects are as great. Once you’re all scanned in, you battle your opponent’s scanned in cards using one of the basic controllers, Mortal Kombat style, but without the exploding eyeballs and spines getting ripped out. At the end of the battle, and here’s where it has the potential to get even neater, your character earns experience. You can scan this experience back into your RFID card for that character, who will retain this info indefinitely and empower him for future battles, on your system or on others.

Sounds really cool, right?

The Hyperscan console is a lightweight little device that contains some modicum of CD-ROM processing power, but not much. For seventy dollars, you can’t expect a digital colossus, so the load times between screens are really long, and the fighters themselves are probably closer to Super Nintendo quality than Playstation quality. They’re not fully-rendered 3D characters - instead, they’re cheaply rendered 3D representations of X-Men (think ReBoot), crudely reduced to animated 2D sprites. Press a button and your sprite will perform the action assigned to that button, and that’s it. This kind of thing worked beautifully for SNES classic games like Killer Instinct, but Killer Instinct had great play control to back it up. There’s a painful delay between the time one presses a button on their controller and the limited animation on the screen responds. There’s not even a guarantee that if your character visually connects to your on-screen enemy, the game will realize that damage should be dealt. There was no noticeable difference between the character’s actual fighting ability before and after the battles were waged either, even while their numerical statistics climbed. And also, the console might actually kill you in your sleep. I don’t know - I re-boxed mine after 20 minutes of wanting to punch real-world things. May it remain trapped there for eternity.

If the game just went in a more cartoony Marvel Vs. Capcom direction (which also used sprite-type animation, on the Dreamcast System), it could have been visually stunning enough to at least be fun to watch, but it’s like watching a mega-low-budget Saturday morning cartoon that still thinks it’s cool to use 3D animation instead of quality anything else. Check out the official website’s videos of the fighting action. That’ll explain it all.

The console certainly isn’t positioned to be at war with the upcoming Wii and PS3 gaming systems, though I venture that some unsuspecting mothers looking to save a few bucks come holidaytime will pick this up, and that saddens me. A few other games are planned for the system thus far, and they might be completely stellar and validate the cost of the system, though I don’t think it would be able to process anything more complex than Super Mario Brothers efficiently. Regardless of the unfortunate X-Men debut, the very premise of this system is worth keeping an eye on. It’s not the first system to use scannable trading cards (the GameBoy Advance eReader beat them to that by many years), but the re-writable cards have great potential. I think I’ll stick to Mario Kart for now.