Ferrari Card Battle

Deep within Ferrari: The Race Experience on Wii, lies a card game! Each player is given 33 cards (or 16 if you play half-deck), and on each card is a picture of a Ferrari with the stats of that particular car. The idea of the game is to trump the other player, by picking a feature of your car that represents it best and trumps that same feature on the other players card. The catch is you can’t see the other players card so you have to guess your strengths. Here’s an example; we start a game and I’ve got a 1958 Testarossa that’s rare as hell and costs $12,000,000. I go first because someone has to, and I’m lucky. I don’t know which car the other player holds, but I’m pretty sure it’s worth less than 12 million dollars, so I pick the money category…

BAM! Sure enough, the opponent’s card is revealed and I win. If I picked weight or year I would have lost, because the older cars have the highest value in this category, and lower weight is also an advantage of the other car. It’s very close in most stats, but my car absolutely killed it in value. Because I win, I get another go! This continues until I get one wrong, then the other player has a chance. It can get trickier when you have more cards, because they get more and more average, and the cards that you obtain are the same ones you trump, since the goal is to get every card. If you’re clever enough and you have heaps of cars, you can use elimination to predict what the other player has left. It’s largely luck based and a very simple card concept that’s probably been done a million times before. You could make this about anything if you just switch Ferrari’s with any kind of sports team or hobby.

Just by playing this game I’ve become a bloody expert on Ferrari’s I knew nothing about, and I can tell you the top speed and horsepower of the 250 GTO, and that $150,000 is a “cheap” Ferrari. I unintentionally memorised stuff about the cars just to trump the other player, learning way more than I would ever look up on my own. This is a great trick from the developers, and incredible marketing for Ferrari, but there’s a huge downside…

…it’s only one player.

What? Yes, it’s true. A single player card battle. All my excitement over the game just went flaccid. Big screw-up here; you can only play against the CPU. I’m not sure it’s the same on the PS3 version but damn, a huge oversight. The CPU could cheat at any time since it LIVES INSIDE THE GAME, the bastard has an unfair advantage (depending on whether I’m winning or not). According to my research the DS version has “local multiplayer” for card challenges, but I can’t confirm it, nor do I have any interest in buying a d-pad racing simulator. I’m not sure why this game was even made.

Nevertheless, I had fun conquering the computer player and I appreciate that System 3 would include a little game like this, rather than a database of pages about Ferrari’s that would put me to sleep. The execution sucks, but the concept is great and I wish more games would do it, especially racing sims that don’t take advantage of the fact that videogames can be interactive.

To recap this extensive review about nothing, here’s some Ferrari’s driving in the wet and losing their shit!

Has anyone found silly little card games like this in other games that kept you amused?