Master of Illusion First Look

Nintendo continues to dream up quirky, unorthodox new uses for the DS, this time with a little budding magician's kit called Master of Illusion. The "game" offers around 20 tricks, some of which you can play as the willing audience; in these cases, the game plays the part of the magician and attempts to wow you by guessing which hand you're holding up, or makes you inadvertently add up some cards that equal the current date. But the more interesting use for Master of Illusion is as a prop in your own magical act. Most of the tricks in the game are geared toward an audience and require only a little bit of tutorial to get you up to speed, so in no time flat you could be out at a party or a bar wooing someone cute with your sleight of hand. Well, maybe.

Master of Illusion will actually ship with its own deck of cards, the backs of which are keyed to the card tricks in the game. Essentially, you'll be able to glance at the back of each card and figure out what it is from the obscure design printed on it. We didn't get to see any of the card tricks firsthand, but we did see a trick that involved a dog looking at three items, with the player asking an audience member to select which item the dog should pick up. The trick here is that when you issue your verbal command to the dog, the leading syllable will determine which item the dog goes for. So a word beginning with a "sh-" sound would correspond to the left item, whereas an "f-" sound would indicate the middle item.

The game isn't infallible. We tried one solo trick called "hand yoga" that had us choose from a number of crazy hand positions and then hold that position up to the DS. Of course, the game attempted to guess which one we'd chosen. However, its choice was based on which hand diagram we'd spent the most time looking at, which wasn't the one we opted for. Like any real magician, Master of Illusion is prone to mistakes. Luckily, there's an extensive tutorial mode built in so you can learn the ins and outs of all the tricks before you try to impress the guy or girl of your dreams with them. These tutorials are presented with comic book-style panel cutouts and animelike artwork.

Master of Illusion appears to be one of the more unique applications of the DS's technology that we've seen in a while. Though it isn't exactly a game in the traditional sense, Nintendo's been making a fortune lately selling DS software that you wouldn't classify as games per se, and this one looks to have no less appeal.