PictoImage

After the obscenely big Christmas dinner, the pudding that follows, the wine and everything else, it’s easy to just fall onto the sofa and watch the same Christmas movies that have been playing for years and of course, watching the Queen’s Speech is required, as well. Then it’s time for those horrible Christmas games, such as Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary. Fortunately, there’s no need to be embarrassed by drunken drawings anymore as SEGA have brought out PictoImage which is very similar to Pictionary, but on the DS.

The basic idea behind PictoImage is exactly as I’ve stated: it’s Pictionary on the Nintendo DS; however, there’s a lot more to it than just a simple Pictionary port to the console.

The Single Player mode is easily the mode that has the most substance to it, and for those who don’t have various friends to play this title against, it’s the saving grace. The Single Player has hundreds of different images to double tap on and then a drawing appears that’s been drawn by a real person, and it’s the player’s job to guess what that drawing is. It sounds simple, as it is; however, it’s not easy. As with all picture-based games, they are easily misinterpreted, especially as real people have apparently drawn the images, as on each guess the creator’s age and gender appears.

Once one has a rough idea of what the image may be, there are two different options of trying to name what it is. There’s the keyboard option, which is where the player just taps the key that they want -- this is easily the most reliable method; however, the non-standard keyboard is very annoying for those who know how to type. The game simply lists all of the letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order; this increases the amount of time it takes to type in the word “horse” or “tiger”.

The other, less reliable, method of input is actually writing the letters down one by one. This would have been a great method; however, the text recognition system isn’t too great. It’s fine for lower case letters, on the most part, but for upper case it confuses “L” and “I” and various other letters as well. If the player’s handwriting is brilliant, this may not be an issue – but for those of us who scrawl it becomes a problem.

The images themselves aren’t always that easy to guess, as there are naturally multiple words for various images such as cry, crying and tears, so on many images multiple guess will be required, which reduces the number of points overall for that round. Some images require a lot of thought as they could almost be anything, and it’s not always the age of the person who’s contributed that causes this – it’s their ability to draw.

There’s a solid tutorial offered as an option as well, so that the player is able to understand how to play the game and what some of the options that are often left unused are for and how they work. This tutorial really eases the player into the game at a nice pace and makes the Single Player much more palatable. The Gallery Mode allows the player to save up to 10 images that they have previously drawn so that they are able to use them again in future games, or just view their fine art.

The Multiplayer Mode follows the same vain of gameplay; however, rather than always being given the option of guessing what the image may be, the players are able to draw their own image and then the other’s have to guess what it is – Pictionary at it’s finest. Unlike Pictionary, there’s the option to erase a part of the drawing that is not correct, and the option to colour it all in with an ample pallet of colours.

Aside from that, there’s also the option of guessing from up to 300 different images in Multiplayer Mode as well, which is governed by a scores based system, and the winner is the person with the most points. This game is not online, and this game would be a lot more fun if it were; however, there would be a lot of room for abuse as this game really is targeted towards the younger end of the gaming spectrum.

There’s really very little to mention about the graphics: they are clean and crisp and there is no bleeding of colours -- it’s all very tidy. The only issue is the poor text recognition from the DS Stylus, as there aren’t many people in the world who have great handwriting in this digital era.

Final Verdict - 7/10
As this is a party game for the youngsters there was no need to add the Single Player option. However, there has been an attempt to prolong the gamelife after Christmas is over with the Single Player, which is actually fairly challenging. With no real flaws, and a Single Player mode to make it stand out from games like Bakushow, it’s a good fun buy for a quick laugh.