How to collect those hundreds of Kid Icarus cards

One of the nifty things about handhelds with cameras is the potential for augmented reality games. Kid Icarus: Uprising has some cool AR features that let you use trading cards to summon character models into your home to admire or do battle. There are literally hundreds of cards, but how are you supposed to get them?

Well, the game itself comes with six cards, randomly chosen from a set of twenty. You can also nab three more cards for free from Club Nintendo if you act fast.

Buy the game at the Nintendo World Store at launch (which may not be practical if you don't live in New York) for three cards, or visit a GameStop on April 14th between 1 and 4 PM and you'll get five cards for trying the game out. GameStop is also hosting Uprising tournaments in LA and New York, meaning more cards for those in attendance.

Nintendo will be handing out free packs of cards at WonderCon, and at their booth at PAX East. Finally, as tradition dictates, several magazines will include a handful of cards. Specifically the April issues of Game Informer (for subscribers only), Nintendo Power, and Best Buy's in-store magazine.

If this all sound like kind of a pain, it's worth noting that there's no data actually stored on the cards. A decent quality printout of a card, or a picture of one on a computer or phone screen, should work just as well as the card itself. Something to think about.

Staff article by Rhody Tobin (March 14, 2012) Rhody likes to press the keys on his keyboard. Sometimes the resulting letters form strings of words that kind of make sense when you think about them for a moment. Most times they're just random gibberish that should be ignored. Ball-peen wobble glurk.