Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting at which The Eye of Judgment was pitched.

"Okay, I have this crazy idea, but stick with me," was how the sell likely started. "Imagine a trading-card game like Magic: The Gathering as a video game. Only it's not really a video game, since you actually have real cards. Where does the PlayStation3 come into it? Great question, Bob. Answer: A camera set up on a stand scans each card as it's played on the board and shows players quick little high-def battles on screen. What's that, Bob? You think it sounds too complex? Nothing could be further from the truth! All it will take to learn to play is a one hour, non-interactive video tutorial!"

The funny thing is that, as it turns out, The Eye of Judgment isn't a half-bad game -- assuming you can survive that mind-numbing tutorial that explains its highly convoluted rules set (we won't even try to digest the game's mechanics for you -- suffice to say creature-cards fight for territory on a 3-by-3 grid).

Plus, it seems likely that geeky fans of trading-card games might truly enjoy combining their pastime with the similarly geeky world of videogames. After all, paper and dice role-playing game players loved the initial crop of RPGs based on their games that popped up for the Nintendo Entertainment System two decades ago, and the genre has since gone on to become one of the most lucrative in the game industry. Certainly, having a three-dimensional visual representation of the environments and the creatures doing battle in players' minds adds a much-needed bit of zing to the card-trading game experience.

And, all joking aside, the game was surprisingly simple to set up. It took just a few minutes to assemble the camera, place it on the cloth board, and set the room's lighting for best card scanning performance.

Still, it's an understatement to call the potential pool of players interested in a game like The Eye of Judgment a niche market. If part of the game's goal is to get the PlayStation3 Eye camera into the hands of as many people as possible (as was Sony's objective with the PlayStation2's Eye Toy Play games), it seems destined not to succeed on that front. It would have been more prudent to release something simpler and more accessible as the first game bundled with a new peripheral.

Bob thought so too, but he works for Toyota now.