	Paint By DS
	Developer: Ertain Publisher: Mercury Release Date: Out Now Players: 1	Words By:
I usually like unusual applications for consoles, so I was looking forward to trying Paint by DS, an interactive colouring book that lets you save your work and grades your final masterpieces. The opening screen gives you the option to ‘Have a break’, select a canvas or visit the gallery. ‘Have a Break’ is a series of mini games that unlock additional colours, frames and effects for your artworks. There are 3 difficulty settings and 4 games: Colour Memory – correctly remember and identify the colours in order Hit and Error – a Whack Attack style game where you touch the chipmunk-like Colourlings as fast as possible. Puzzle - a picture is divided into blocks and you have to rearrange the blocks to restore the picture. Pixel Race – move the stylus around the track as fast as possible. So on to the actual colouring: You start with a basic tutorial and a palette tutorial, which explain how to enlarge the area you are working on, how to select and mix colours and negotiate your way around the touch screen icons. Then you select the picture you wish to colour. There are 11 to choose from at the start and you can opt to use coloured pencils, watercolours or oil paints. The different types of colouring device do feel different – the pencils are very precise, whereas the oils and watercolours do seem to almost flow and give you much more richness to the colours. There are a couple of pieces by well-known artists, but a few too many pictures of flowers for our liking. An unfinished piece can be saved – although this mind-numbingly slow - to be continued later and finished pieces can be graded, on colour (does your choice of colour match the reference image?) and technique (how closely you stayed within the lines). For some reason you can only save one unfinished picture at a time, a fact which seems daft as completed works are saved in a gallery, and having more than one painting on the go at a time would have been nice for all sorts of reasons. Paint by DS is an interesting idea and if you have a lot of time on your hands you could find it quite satisfying. It’s not a pick up and play game, but it may well give you something to do if you’re ill in bed or on a very long train journey.

Best Bits
- Mixing colours.
- The different effects achieved by the different media.
- It’s something unusual to try on your handheld.

Worst Bits
- Lack of well-known paintings.
- Boring choice of paintings.
- Very slow saving pictures
- Only saving one ‘work in progress’.
- The mini-games are an afterthought – they should have given you more options to save rather than waste time on these.


by: Debba