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[Pie]

THQ's uDraw Tablet was originally released on the Nintendo Wii back in November of 2010. It met with modest success for the publisher, and following this the decision was made to move the device over to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This version released a year after the original version in November of 2011 with a total of three compatible games, one of which was included with the tablet. After four months of production, the device was discontinued on all platforms in February of this year, leaving a grand total of 1.4 million unsold units and a sixty million dollar operating loss for the beginning of 2012, and is likely a large contributing factor to THQ's recent financial troubles and threats of NASDAQ delisting.

Today, in this week's special edition of Pie Reviews, I'm going to be looking at the device itself and the games released for it, namely uDraw Studio: Instant Artist, Pictionary: Ultimate Edition and Marvel Super Hero Squad: Comic Combat.

Pictionary: Ultimate Edition

Pictionary: Ultimate Edition is a port of Pictionary for the Wii, developed and ported by Page 44 Studios (who you likely haven't heard of, they really haven't done anything notable) and published by THQ. If you've played Pictionary (or even Draw Something) before, you get the general idea here, and if you haven't, essentially, it's played in teams and one player will be given a word and they have to draw it so their team-mates can guess what it is where they win and get to advance around the board. When the pencil-and-paper version is played with friends (in my case, all of whom are slightly-to-very drunk) it's a lot of fun.

As an adaptation of Pictionary, it's reasonably faithful, though “enhanced” with quite a few gimmicks. There are a load of different drawing tools and colours you can use instead of just a pencil when you're drawing your word, and there are modifiers to the round like only being able to use the giant “finger paint” tool and having the canvas spin whilst you're trying to draw your word.

There are a couple of different modes, from two which simulate an actual board game (the difference between these basically being how many non-standard rounds there are) to one which just lets you configure everything exactly how you want it and play some rounds of Pictionary. There's some very basic customisability like being able to draw on your game pieces to decorate them, and being able to add custom words (knowing humankind, mostly swears) to the games. The only issue with adding words is that it uses the PS3's input panel and you have to add them one by one so it gets unbelievably boring and drawn out. God forbid the game use some sort of handwriting recognition technology, it's not like there are open source solutions available...

The game's interface is fairly slow to interact with, it likes to make you wait around frequently whilst the game catches up, so it lacks the immediacy of conventional Pictionary. There's honestly not much more to say on the thing, it's for the most part just Pictionary on PS3. You'll likely find this game cheaper than you will a (new) copy of the Pictionary board game, but you'd likely have a lot more fun with the board game than you would with this – the game just lends itself to real paper so much better than it does to a tablet.