When Steve Boxer got his hands on the new Wii tablet peripheral uDraw last year, his early opinion was moderately favourable. "uDraw is by no means an earth-shatteringly clever input device like Microsoft's Kinect, and it would never make any grandiose claims about changing the face of gaming," he said, "but it should prove pretty attractive to parents worried about their offspring spending all day in front of their Wiis without achieving anything concrete."
So how does it fare six months on, now that the finished article and the three launch title games are about to hit the shelves? Pretty much exactly the same.
Everything about the uDraw is reasonably capable. The one pure art package, uDraw Studio, is indeed, as Steve suggested, more powerful than it looks; and, while it requires a great amount of practice to perfect, even if you can face the time investment, the rewards are only moderate and by their nature – even with the SD card option to save them – fleeting.
As with cheap packages that give the impression of oil painting techniques or introduce children to certain aspects of art, uDraw Studio perhaps has some value. Whether it will ever replace pen and paper (or canvas, cardboard, chalk or any of the other "surfaces" it allows you to draw on) is doubtful.
Also released is an "adventure" title called Dood's Big Adventure which, again, takes time to master the actually quite simple but rather badly explained controls. Things do gradually click and the various platform-style games should have a childish appeal but this is little more than a DS game on a bigger screen.
Ironically, the best game of the three launch titles is Pictionary, the old pen-and-paper board game given a 21st century twist. As with the recent DS version, the introduction of technology is both a bonus and a drawback.
As with the conventional game, the purpose of Pictionary is to guess what your teammate is drawing. A correct answer earns a roll of the die, and you move your team's piece around the board until someone finishes the game.
In this incarnation, instead of a physical board, counters and a die, everything is on screen; to roll the die, you flick the pen across the uDraw tablet. The colour of square you land on determines what sort of subject you draw next – person, animal, object, etc – and whether you're drawing just for your team or as an "All Play" option. The use of the TV here certainly comes into its own, although you do have to rely on everybody closing their eyes as onscreen prompts have replaced the cards.
As well as a freehand option, the uDraw offers various choices of line and shape tools, colours, line type and width. Chances are, however, you won't. With only 90 seconds to guess, and a tablet that takes some getting used to in terms of pressure, these extra options generally just slow you down.
Where the game and technology work best is with the second game variation, Pictionary Mania, which adds some interesting variations to the theme – such as having to draw without looking at the screen, or having to draw while the screen rotates. They're fun variations that breathe a little new life into the game.
Whether it's enough to justify a uDraw purchase is highly debatable. As a peripheral, the uDraw should have potential but, at this point, it doesn't feel like it's being fully explored.
