It's an interesting thing reviewing a "game" like Ping Pals; especially when 90% of what the game offers is already done better by PictoChat. Ping Pals is basically trying to replace PictoChat by offering what you already have built into your DS plus a few extra features, such as: customizable avatars, collectibles, minigames, snapshot save system, and varied music and sound effects. So how does this $30 offering stack up against your free copy of PictoChat? Unfortunately, not very well.

Ping Pals at its core is still just a chat program, but somehow WayForward has managed to execute this in a dissapointing fashion. For starters, the area for drawing a picture or typing a message is much smaller than what you are offered in PictoChat, so your drawings will suffer in quality a lot. Furthermore, you can't combine text and drawings in a single picture, something that is sorely missed. The lack of different pencil sizes, an eraser, language accents, and many symbols cause the chat feature to suffer in Ping Pals. It's hard to build a good piece of software around a flawed core, but it's not all bad in Ping Pals, some of it is at least mediocre.


Oooh, an avatar!

WayForward has added a few bonuses outside of the chat features of Ping Pals to justify the $30 tag, but much of it just doesn't hold up. For example, including multiplayer minigames in a chat program is a good idea, but only including two of them is a bad one. One of these two games is called "Doodle," and it's basically a game of Pictionary, which can be fun for a few minutes. The second multiplayer minigame is called "Hot Potato," and it's the quickest way to bore yourself and up to 7 friends. Basically you type the word "pass" to pass the bomb to another chatter. An unseen timer counts down until the bomb explodes, causing the person who still has it to lose. There are a couple of single player minigames, but I won't embarrass the game by going into them.

The customizable avatars are pretty cool, but earning the money to buy gear for your Ping Pal is tedious. If you are determined to collect all the suits, hats, accessories, backgrounds, sound effects, and colored texts, you'll be spending hours playing the repetitious minigames. In the end, most will decide it's not worth the effort, but it is still fun to mess around with when you do have the money.

In the end Ping Pals tries to rise above PictoChat by offering more, but it somehow feels like less. PictoChat just feels more solid, usable, and a whole lot more accessible. Unless you are a hardcore collector of all things digital, I'd suggest putting your $30 on another DS offering.