Wave Scanner: bulky DS attachment ups the fun

There's probably no small overlap among folks who play fantasy video games and those who while away the hours engrossed in Magic-style card battles, so we're thinking that a new attachment for the Nintendo DS has a real shot at succeeding. Capcom and TakaraTomy will jointly be launching the so-called Wave Scanner in Japan next month, finally bringing the fun of collectible playing cards to the Megaman series of games. The rather bulky scanner works with a number of different Rockman Star Force titles (Rockman is Megaman's original Japanese name), and allows players to swipe special cards for influencing gameplay. We're not really sure why this ¥4,200 ($35) add-on needs to be so big and thus hinder the whole portability thing that the DS has going for it, but who knows, maybe it takes a Cell processor and some serious RAM to process those complicated bar codes.

[Kichigai Mentat @ Jan 22nd 2007 8:35AM]

How is this different from the eReader? And didn't that thing flair horribly?

[Aaron @ Jan 22nd 2007 9:22AM]

Nah man, the e-reader is cool and so is this thing. There is rad new stuff for coming out all the time. I am totally glad Animal Crossing prompted me to buy some gizmo for some cards I found at a store a total of 2 times. It is definetly worth the money.

[shirizaki @ Jan 22nd 2007 9:48AM]

Somewhat. the only difference is that this is for an actual series of games, as the eReader was just a standalone device.

This will probbaly fail here but be a huge success over there.

[Chad @ Jan 22nd 2007 11:35AM]

Looks like a slightly reworked version of a standard MagTek magnetic card reader, which may account for its size. Normally these things just hook up to PC via USB.

[kgitch @ Jan 23rd 2007 6:49AM]

Today I attended the Takara-Tomy Toy Forum in Tokyo and I can say that it actually is not quite as big as it appears in that CG image above, but also the reason it is not smaller is that it is designed to also be played as a stand-alone LCD game including its own sound (using headphones).

[Phil @ Jan 23rd 2007 12:18PM]

There already is a Megaman trading card game. It was made by Decipher a few years back.... and tanked horribly.