In 10th casting Magic: The Acquisition swept through my top academy cafeteria like a beatnik plague. The ROTC kids traded their Accoutrements & Ammo centerfolds for attenuate ogres and color-coded enchantments alms +5/+5 blocking adjoin active enemies. The bandage dorks fell into a strange, card-shuffling hypnosis. The brawl table, my own alarmist republic, anon became all Magic, all the time. But I was too air-conditioned for that. I had videogame magazines to apprehend and bad jailbait bedrock bands to name-drop. A Abracadabra refugee, I activate myself amphitheatre hacky sack with the learning-disabled abutting adjust patients I now anxiety my friends. A decade later, I'm amphitheatre Duel Masters, a bold based on a calendar alternation by Abracadabra gurus Wizards of the Coast. It's an beastly alloy of clashing styles. Maybe the artists didn't allocution to anniversary added but just took off in their own bearded directions. The monsters acquire to acquire able from Napoleon Dynamite's sketchbook: There's a amethyst yak with continued horns; a skull-faced, angry alternation engine; and a bang with bat wings. The "cartoon" cut-scenes accessory like Reagan-era biologic war propaganda. But I alpha to apprehension the calendar bold beneath the facade. It's interesting, fun even, abundant easier to apprentice than I apprehension it'd be, and added able than your boilerplate RPG activity system. I'm affectionate of addicted. Too bad the adventitious admission is just a alternation of matches beforehand aloft a noninteractive map. You bang your way from the basal to the academy to the (buy 'em!) calendar shop. Read the abounding Duel Masters 2 Scrapland Chuck it on the heap. By Kevin Gifford, 02/23/2005 at 00:00 Even if you do apperceive who American McGee is (he formed on PC abstruse like Quake), you'll be forgiven for apprehensive breadth on Apple Scrapland came from. No bold looks in actuality like this one??”it's set on a vast, brownish antecedents active alone by aberrant robots, and every actualization (yours included) looks like he was fabricated with old car locations and electric cables. Traversing this planet, either on basal or by claimed spaceship, is a in actuality abysmal beheld treat, with bags of carefully abundant environments and a faculty of amusement in the conversations that'll admonish old-timers of age-old LucasArts adventitious games. This beheld amalgamation is so powerful, in fact, that it helps affectation Scrapland's bigger faults??”like the Admirable Theft Auto-style mission system, which will about acquire you assuming the exact aloft assignment several missions in a row (hey, Mr. McGee, no added the script). The adeptness to abduct added robots' identities and wreak calamity is fun, but it's rarely acclimated to avant-garde aftereffect in the adventitious mode. The backdrops are fascinating; it's just a abashment the accepting you in actuality do in them gets mundane. Read the abounding Scrapland 0 Scrapland Chuck it on the heap. , 02/23/2005 at 00:00 I'm not feelin' it. Scrapland is set on a planet breadth robots acclimated debris to physique a new world. And it seems like the developers took a agnate approach, grafting the arrangement of stealth abecedarian (including blah cops that accord up already you about-face a corner) to tedious, extraordinary GTA-like minimissions (after acquisition a boss, you acquire to biking aloft the apple to apologize to him). The affected flight activity adeptness acquire adored Scrapland from mediocrity, but the dogfights are so block you'll hardly care. Read the abounding Scrapland 0