Rindi and Skuld's Great Scientific Adventure

By now, I think we've established that my favorite Japanese arcade game is Pop'n Music. Well, Skuld likes Pop'n Music too (we've gone through several entertaining rounds of battle mode), but her favorite game by far is Sangokushi Taisen. It's based on the Three Kingdoms period in China, and is what can only be described as an online arcade trading card game. Sound complicated? It is. >:D

You collect cards by playing the game - the machine spits out cards after every game. Player data (name, wins, losses, ranking) is stored on an IC card. Basically, you choose one of the three kingdoms (each represented by a different color), build up an army of cards from that kingdom, and then face your troops against another player somewhere in Japan. The players come from a nationwide pool, so you could be playing someone all the way across the country. All cards have a cost, with the better cards having higher costs. The cost limit is eight, so you can either use eight weak cards, or fewer (but stronger) cards. You move your troops by pushing the cards around on the playing field. The object is to get your troops across the field to attack your opponent's castle. Action takes place on a video screen, where you can watch your troops running around, attacking, and casting spells. Destroyed troops have to return to the player's own castle to recharge before setting out again. It's interesting because you're up against actual people instead of a computer (you can play the computer if you want, but that's not nearly as fun). As with any trading card game, the people who have the money to buy rare cards dominate the game, so that kind of puts a damper on things...

Anyway, Skuld and I were curious about how the game managed to read cards. I thought there might be some sort of chip to read, but that sounded rather pricey, and people throw out unwanted cards all the time. I put an extra card in water for a while to separate the front and the back, but there was nothing inside. Since there was no chip inside, we hypothesized that the game sensors were optical, and we went over to the arcade to check it out.

At the arcade, I put down the separated card on the table, and it recognized the back but not the front. Understandable. Even for a normal, unaltered card, only the back can be read. The back of a card consists of part of the character portrait from the front, and a few boxes with text in them. Next, I completely crumpled the card so that it was completely illegible. I took another card and tore it in half. Lastly, I took a third card and folded it in half twice. We tried all three of these cards, and only the third card was readable by the game. Conclusion: the sensors must indeed be optical. Our guess is that it reads the character portrait... But that's just a guess. A good next experiment would be to cut out the character portrait from one card and tape it to a different card, to see if we can trick the machine.

Haha. Yay for the scientific method. Yay for being nerds. This is how MIT students amuse themselves when they have nothing better to do. ^__^;

- Rindi

Current song: None
Current mood: Still exhausted