This is what you get when you have a national mag with nobody covering the "video game beat": faux articles that get everything wrong, as if somebody read the company press release and then just imagined what all the hype-talk might mean.
At work, I get a magazine called KidScreen, which covers the kids TV business around the world. I always enjoy leafing through it, because you see what kind of kids shows are popping up all over the world (I saw full-page ads for Boo-Bah and The Wiggles inside KidScreen years before those shows appeared in the States.) But the latest issue has an unexpected blurb about the DS game Drawn to Life that manages to get it almost completely wrong. And the wrongness is the most dangerous kind of misleading dialogue, because it extrapolates on the phonied-up press release and makes the game out to be something it is decidedly not.
Since I know you don't get this magazine, you can read the original article here, but I've duplicated it in its entirety here so we can tick off all the parts that are incorrect.
Customization in video games definitely isn't a new concept - but choosing hair colors and T-shirt styles is destined for obsolescence now that Drawn to Life is on the market. THQ's first original property for the Nintendo DS platform takes the Wii's popular Mii avatars to the next level, letting users draw their own characters and game environments from scratch with the DS stylus.
WTF does the Wii have to do with it, aside from name-checking the most popular gaming option for the last two holiday shopping seasons?
"From scratch"? Nuh-uh. In Drawn to Life, you have some very specific templates that you must fill. You always have a bounding box for your design, sometimes just a simple rectangle but often a pre-designated shape that you color, not draw on your own.
And "game environments" is an awfully big phrase for "sometimes you have to draw a moving platform."
The app offers an endless array of colors, brush types, guides and stamps so gamers can tailor-make an avatar in their own image, or plumb the depths of their imaginations to play as human-like fantastical creatures and beasties.
Insta-wrong! That "endless array of colors" means about 25 at any one time. I see a very strong end to 25 colors. Although amateur 2D sprite designers should be all over a game of this type, they will be sorely disappointed when their designs can't even match a decent SNES sprite.
And as a character moves through the game to save a village from being overrun by evil forces, the stylus becomes a valuable tool for shifting the outcome of the story.
I was going to let this sentence go until I noticed the phrase "shifting the outcome." Let me tell you something about Drawn to Life. If you opt to NOT draw the fucking moving platform shape, you're going to fall into the fucking death pit, bokay? This is a pedantically linear game. You are not shifting any outcome, you're just doing what the game tells you or else you won't be playing it for very long.
For instance, a player can draw a bubble helmet around their hero's head so he won't drown, or scribble moving platforms in the sky so he won't fall to his death.
Wrong again! This makes it sound like you get to draw as you go, or that you can quickdraw something at the last second to save your guy. You can't. On the levels that are underwater, you must draw a diver's helmet before you even step into the water. And if you have to draw a platform, you are asked to do so at the beginning of the level, and that image is then duplicated throughout the game.
Developed by 5th Cell, Drawn to Life, which hit retail in the fall, also offers multicard play with the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi connection, so gamers can swap drawings and trade heroes with friends.
Interestingly, the Drawn to Life manual says absolutely nothing about multicard play, but the game does have it. So since I'll never meet anybody else who owns this game, I'll never know precisely what it does. The game calls it "trade" mode, so I'll assume it is limited to exchanging creations back and forth.
However, I'll tell you this: it sure as shit does not use the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi Connection. Because, dear reader, the Wi-Fi Connection refers to online play, not a simple DS-to-DS local network.
This article was clearly written by someone who never touched the game. Not that they intended it to serve as a review - it's obviously just a Hey-Can-You-Believe-This-Trendsetting-Technology kind of piece - but if any readers actually act on that information, they're going to walk away with the all-too-familiar impression that video games talk big but don't measure up unless you're in the second grade. It's a shame, really.
The gang at THQ must be pretty pleased with the kiss-fest though.
