[Editor's note: Crispy Gamer does not condone emotional outbursts like the one at the end of this review. Tom Chick has been reprimanded and enrolled in an anger management seminar.]

Here's a strange brew. Combine collectible card games with board games for something that's equal parts randomness (the luck of the draw, die rolling) and strategy (deck building, territorial control). To further defy any pigeonholing, add in a stock market gimmick. Now present it all as a Japanese role-playing game so no one looking at the box would be any the wiser. Welcome to Culdcept. Oh yeah, go ahead and cram in a storyline in case anyone wants to know what a culdcept is or why dragon zombies are fighting spudmen. For the record, I couldn't tell you to save my life, but I can tell you the cut scenes that probably explain all that stuff are skippable.

Re-Culd

This latest version for the Xbox 360 is a follow-up to the 2003 PlayStation 2 title, which was nothing if not obscure. Call it a cult sensation for how few people played it, and for how much they loved it. The fans certainly weren't satisfying this particular jones anywhere else. The elevator pitch for Culdcept is "Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering," which leads to one of two responses: "Huh?" or "Awesome!"

Apparently enough people had the second response to merit a sequel/update, hence Culdcept Saga. Unfortunately, almost nothing has been done to tidy up the sloppiness and confusion of the original game, which could be forgiven in a freshman effort at an unproven concept. You try mixing the gameplay equivalents of peanut butter with chocolate and see how right you can get it the first time.

Since this is the second game, the problems from the first time around should be resolved, or at least assayed. No such thing has happened. Instead, the developers at Omiya Soft seem to show contempt for their fans by slapping them in the face with the same horrible interface and the same messy design choices. Granted, they've added online multiplayer, and it's pretty sweet when your deck isn't hopelessly outmatched (a new blind mode gives players roughly equivalent pre-built decks), but if this were a gift horse, you could apply a certain maxim about looking it in the mouth. Considering you just shelled out 40 bucks, you have the right to expect more.

Through a glass narrowly

The problems are mostly interface issues. Although Culdcept borrows a lot of concepts from board gaming, it's missing the clarity you get in a board game, where all the info you need is laid out before you. There's no easy way to get an overview of Culdcept's board, and important information is pointlessly scattered among various screens and displays, which leads to a lot of paging around. It's like playing a board game by looking at it through a paper towel tube.

Furthermore, Culdcept can't be bothered to present important information at times you most need it. For instance, many cards rely on factors such as the number of territories of a particular color, or how many creatures have been killed over the course of the game, or whether one player has more cards in his deck. This sort of information is often unavailable, forcing you to play the cards blind. Then there's the fact that you're locked out of the detailed card text when you're actually playing the game, and you're locked out of all the online help entirely during a battle.

It doesn't help that there was no effort to make the game intuitive to a new audience. ST is called "strength" in the online help, but "attack power" in the manual; HP is "hit points" in the online help, but "vitality" in the manual. Magic is represented by a capital G for some inscrutable reason. The deck building gets more and more user-hostile as you get more cards, which is when you most need a sleek deck-building interface.

Playing peek-a-boo

Perhaps the biggest sign of the developer's contempt for the fans is that Culdcept Saga is still hamstrung by its original design as a multiplayer game to be played by people in the same room. This means that players' hands occasionally flash onscreen, but there's no way to actually check his cards again, or even find out what they do. When a battle comes up, he who remembers best is guaranteed to win. It's like playing Magic: The Gathering with someone who periodically shows you the artwork on his cards, but won't let you look when you need to. There's no reason this has to be a part of playing online or against the artificial intelligence. I could perhaps live with all of Culdcept's other peccadilloes if this one glaring flaw was fixed.

Then there are issues of the game's pacing. You cannot bypass or even speed up the goofy animations of cards presenting themselves and smacking each other with animated weapons, claws and gobs of slime. Games can easily stretch out into three or more hours. You can't save and resume multiplayer games or versus games, and saving a campaign game disables any unlockables. You can't even resign a game, short of just turning off your Xbox 360.

It's a mystery why the developers let this sort of stuff happen in Culdcept's second iteration. It's disappointing and sloppy, and it seems to indicate this is just a quick and dirty sequel shoved onto the market without any attempt to improve it. Sure, the multiplayer is great and the new cards are cool. But why not try to improve the basic experience before layering in the new stuff?

Culdcept Saga has had me ping-ponging between an enthusiastic "Buy It!" and an emphatic "Fry It!" rating. While the basic game is good -- actually, it's pretty damn awesome if you're into this kind of thing -- the half-assed execution causes my nerd rage to flare with the heat of a thousand suns. Even though I'm playing the daylights out of this thing, wholly seduced by the board-gaminess, thrilled by the dramatic reversals of fortune in a single die roll, determined to try a new deck, and utterly undone by my own drive to earn new cards, I will periodically shake my fist at the screen and cry out, in all caps, "DAMN YOU, CULDCEPT SAGA! DAMN YOU TO HELL! WAAAAH! ARGHHHH! URK! MRF!"

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.