FREE: Duel Masters for the PS2

I will take it to work with me in the morning and try to get some pics of the disk and any scratches.

The disc is at my work so I can send it out when the auction ends....but I am almost positive the back of the disc is silver.

I honestly have never played it myself. It was given to my daughter and she didn't play it at all either.

Card battling has been around for hundreds of years, certainly much longer than videogames have existed. Somewhere along the line woodblock prints of royalty evolved into oversized monsters with heavy artillery, but for the purpose of this review, the history of the genre may as well have started with Magic the Gathering. Whatever your point of reference, the latest evolution of the genre has arrived in the form of Duel Masters on the PS2. This is the most complete console version of a card battle game to date on the system. It includes all of the features that one would expect of a game in this genre, and a couple extras to boot. Unfortunately, there is one feature that is sorely missed, but we'll discuss that later.

So what exactly is Duel Masters? For experienced duelists, it is a monster battle card game based on the Magic the Gathering rule set. Like certain other card games, it has been a popular craze in Japan for years. There is also a Duel Masters cartoon, which of course prominently features the graphic excitement of strategically comparing cards with detailed statistics. The GBA was already graced with Duel Master's Sempai Legends earlier this year but this marks the first version of the game to appear on a console.

This is also the first pure card battle game on the PS2, barring Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist of the Roses, which has a heavy chessboard, strategy element. In Duel Masters, there is no battlefield to navigate, or positioning of allies against enemies. This is a straight up card duel, where the quality of your deck and the luck of the draw are what determine the outcome. If none of this makes any sense because you are completely new to the card battle phenomenon, there is a detailed tutorial that can be accessed from the menu or at the beginning of story mode.