Once again this week, I’m doing something a little different. Not quite a review, not quite a product overview…but something in between. I’m checking out a hand held game called MatchMaster. This is billed as a ‘head to head soccer game’, just in case you aren’t getting enough of the sport this time of year.

I’ll be at San Diego Comic Con this week, taking in all the sights and sounds, and I’ll be doing coverage every night at my regular site, Michael’s Review of the Week. Next week right here, I’ll run down the top ten best – and worst – news from the show. Until then, let’s play a little soccer…

MatchMaster – Head to Head Soccer

I’m showing you two versions of the game, one light blue and one dark blue. You actually buy one at a time of course, at a SRP of about $20, but you need two if you’re going to do the ‘head to head’ aspect.

Think of this as a Soccer Player Tamagotchie. You ‘train’ your soccer player by deciding when he/she sleeps, eats, and trains – and just what they’ll be eating and doing for their training. You also can play a series of single person mini-training games to increase your players strength, agility and other factors.

The hand held device is egg shaped, with 4 small buttons and an arrow pad. One button is Start – pretty obvious, but you can use it to start the various mini-games, and it also works as a pause button. The ‘sound’ button turns the volume up and down with each press. The A and B buttons are used to navigate the menus. A works like an escape key, taking you back up a level, and B works like Select.

The arrow pad works like you’d expect, moving things and your player left, right, up and down. On the two units, one had some trouble with the pad being a big sticky and unresponsive, making playing the games tougher than it needed to be.

Once you’ve popped in the 2 AAA batteries (not included), you set up some basic info for your player, like the display language, players name, club and number, and the date and time which are critical to the timing of various daily events.

The player has 6 life lines covering Power, Health, Fitness, Sppeed, Ability and Condition. These start out in the ‘danger’ zone, with only 15 points in each. As your player trains, sleeps, eats and plays games, these life lines go up. You want to keep these 6 areas fairly well balanced, to avoid injuries. Over developing in any one can cause your poor player some serious pain.

You’ll use the Daily Routine Planner (DRP), well, every day. Here is where you decide when and how long your player will sleep, what he or she will do for his morning and afternoon workout, and what they’ll eat for their three meals. The better the choices the better your player becomes. However, you can’t set all this up at once – there are specific times during the day (always the same) to set them up. For example, you can’t decide what you’ll be having for dinner except between the hours of 5pm and 7pm that day. That means you need to keep your player with you most of the day.

You can also play the 7 mini-games on your egg, each designed to improve different skills. The first two times you play them in any single day, they add to your lifelines. Any additional plays do not – then you’re just doing it for fun. These aren’t exactly the most exciting games – again, think 90’s Tamagotchies for level of detail and graphics.

When you reach Pro Level on the lifelines (all of them have to be 20 or higher) you can start playing Infrared games against another egg. There are 4 games in this mode – Match (where it’s a straight match), Sprints (where you race against each other using the key pad), Penalty (each player gets 5 penalty kicks against the other), and Free Kick (each player takes 5 free kicks and tries to get it over the heads of the defenders).

All the games, both single and duel player, are fairly quick and easy to play. The outcome usually depends on how well you’ve trained your little guy, so it does help to teach kids about proper nutrition, exercise and rest. The basic graphics are likely to be an issue for kids of the PS3 generation, but this is more in like with the 7 – 9 crowd, kids that love soccer and are looking for something else to fuel their passion. For the average kid that isn’t a soccer fan, it’s far less likely to hold their interest.

These are exclusive to Wal-mart right now, and they run about $20 a pop. There’s also a sweepstakes going on right now where you get a code inside the package to enter, and could win a three day David Beckham Academy course in London or LA for you and several of your friends. Check out more details at MatchMaster Games.

And if you do pick one up, try to treat your little David better than I did…

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