Remember the hours you used to spend as a child (or maybe even as an adult) playing with some computer painting program? The hours you spent crafting the perfect pink dinosaur, that field of fluffy sheep you made when you discovered the spray paint tool for the first time, or even that under the sea picture you did when you found the fish-shaped stamp?
My childhood self could have been an artist.
uDraw brings all this and much, much more to the Nintendo Wii. The Nintendo-white, reassuringly-chunky GameTablet and it's attached pen are all you need to start creating your masterpieces. When you buy the uDraw GameTablet, it comes bundled with uDraw Studio - a deceptively deep piece of software with every feature and tool you could think of. The nib of the pen is pressure sensitive, with a harder press giving a thicker line, and a lighter press a thinner, softer line. You can edit pretty much anything about the strokes too - thickness, opacity, colour and other things - and uDraw Studio will generate a little preview for you. And for those of you (like me) who suck at drawing, it comes with a wide selection of pre-drawn stamps - so even we can end up with a half-decent looking picture. It even comes with some virtual colouring books to keep the little ones entertained - something we're sure will go down a storm.
It even has a hole to fit a wrist strap. Although, if you need a wrist strap, you might be playing it wrong.
You might be forgiven for thinking this software is exclusively for children, with it's bright, big-buttoned interface, but it can be used to create very, very, scarily good pictures - as the uDraw team found out when they gave it to the artist David Kassan to test drive, and he came up with this, which puts my beach to shame:
All is not lost if you can't draw to save your life though, as uDraw comes with a whole host of tutorials to teach you the different strokes, shades and techniques, so you'll be creating digital masterpieces in no time. And once you've finished your picture, it can be saved in the game's gallery, where you can go back to it at any time to add some finishing touches. You can even save it to an SD card, and then print or email it to your friends and family.
As an extra special added touch, uDraw also records you drawing your picture, so you can show your friends and family just how you did that masterpiece that you sent them. Something we can imagine children will love, because after they've shown you it and it's been printed out and stuck on the fridge, you can have the 'look mom - this is how I did it' thing. But mercifully, if your kids insist on showing you how they drew it each and every day, you can speed the recap up to 4x, and get it over with quickly.
After sitting through the demonstration of the software, we were suitably impressed, but the one concern we had was lastability. While the package seemed versatile, we weren't sure if it had the lasting appeal to keep people coming back - if you, or your family likes drawing, then obviously this will rarely leave your Wii's tray, but what about those who need a little more encouragement? Luckily, THQ have really thought this through, and are planning on going all out with the community aspect of uDraw Studio, with a social website planned that's set to offer a regularly updated list of challenges to keep your drawing fingers twitching, and let artists of all ages share tips, and the best examples of their work. While its obviously still early days, we heard mention of regular competitions, divided into different age categories, keeping it fair for all ages - so any worries of uDraw Studio being just a throwaway bundle that you'll only use once seem to be being dealt with.
And if that's not enough to get you interested, the uDraw tablet is much more than a one trick pony, with many more in the pipeline, and two games planned to launch alongside the hardware - a brand new platform/drawing adventure for kids, entitled Dood's Big Adventure, along with a game that has us genuinely excited - the family favourite drawing game, Pictionary.
Pictionary has two game modes - traditional, and the brand new Pictionary Mania mode. The traditional Pictionary mode plays, well, like traditional pictionary, with players rolling dice and moving round the board, landing on category squares and drawing what the category card tells you - for your team mates to guess. Pictionary Mania plays in the same way - except there are a few surprises, as the category cards have been replaced by squares that have different challenges, with often hilarious consequences. For example, pink squares mean no peeking - the person who is drawing can't look at the TV to draw and one of the other squares (we can't remember what colour it was) means the screen rotates slowly as you're trying to draw - making it much harder to create anything that even vaguely resembles your clue. And most importantly, one problem anyone who's played Pictionary with a child finds is that sometimes a child doesn't quite know what the word they need to draw is - in uDraw Pictionary, you can keep asking the game for a new clue, until you get one the child should be able to manage. They really have thought of everything.
My guess is this one was not drawn while the screen was rotating,
Dood's Big Adventure, on the other hand, is an interesting original game, designed primarily for children (and big kids) - described as 'Drawn To Life on steroids'. In case you missed it, Drawn To Life is a charming little game for the Wii and DS in which you make your way through levels by drawing objects to help you. In Dood's Big Adventure, you're able to customise everything from Dood himself, to the various baddies that litter the levels. There are over sixty levels for you to conquer across four different game modes: Pen Panic, in which the stylus lets you draw trampolines to bounce Dood through the levels, and flick ink at enemies and walls in your way; Roly Poly, where you have to tilt the uDraw GameTablet left and right to roll Dood through each level; Bubble Trouble, which gets you to use the stylus to guide Dood through the levels avoiding all the sharp objects, enemies and other dangerous stuf; and Fan Frenzy, in which the Dood has been inflated like a balloon, and you can use the stylus to blow and move Dood around the level.
This is why you shouldn't drink seven glasses of fizzy drink in an hour, kids...
uDraw is due for release around February next year in the UK, and will cost around $69.95 for the GameTablet and uDraw Studio bundle, and about $29.95 each for Dood's Big Adventure and Pictionary stateside - no UK prices have been revealed as yet, but as nice as it would be to see a proper conversion, we'd imagine it'll probably be a straight dollar:pound jobby.
Having seen the hardware, and software in action at largest games fair in the world, Gamescom, we were left suitably impressed. Melding the best parts of the Wii and DS together, with two great games, and one impressive software package available at launch, uDraw is definitely one to keep an eye on - it's just a shame it's going to miss Christmas. We'll keep you posted, so stay tuned.
