E3 '07: Crayola Treasure Adventures Hands-On

There's something to be said for the laid-back approach of kid-friendly games, such as Crayola Treasure Adventures. The Nintendo DS is the perfect home for a virtual coloring book, thanks to the tactile nature of the stylus and touch screen. Well, take heart, all you secret crayon artists (yes, we know you are out there), because Treasure Adventures turns your favorite Nintendo handheld into a digital easel, and we spent some time at E3 2007 revisiting our childhoods.

There are two ways of experiencing Treasure Adventures. In coloring-book mode, you just color. There are 120 crayons and 100 pictures to choose from, so there is plenty of art to create. But you aren't just stuck with crayons. For example, you can color with a marker instead, which changes the texture of your color. It's easy to color--you just select your crayon and scribble on the area you want to fill in with color. But take heart, desktop doodlers: You can't color outside of the lines, so you don't have to worry that your touch screen will look like the drawings your mom attached to the refrigerator door with alphabet magnets.

There is also an adventure mode, which offers a lot more activities than simple coloring. In this mode, all the color has been sucked out of the world. Guided by your crayon friend Tip, it's up to you to restore the missing hues. This mode sends you across the globe, where you must complete various familiar activity puzzles to push forward and earn new crayons.

The first activity we tackled was a jigsaw puzzle, which provided us a clue to our next global destination. As with similar minigames in other games, this involved dragging pieces onto the correct spot with the stylus. The puzzle revealed to us a drawing of Egyptian pyramids, so we went off to Africa. This brought the next puzzle, where we had to touch various rainbow-colored objects on the touch screen. Each one depicted a connect-the-dots puzzle, which let us either touch the numbers or drag the stylus across them to reveal the object we were drawing.

The last activity was a coloring puzzle. In this timed minigame, a picture appeared on the touch screen, and we had to color various pieces of it. However, if we took too much time, parts we had already colored would go blank and we would have to color them again. The scribbling was fast and furious, so by the time we were done, our wrists had gotten a better workout than in our last Diablo 2 session.

Obviously, Crave Entertainment is going for a younger market with Crayola Treasure Adventures, but parents and young players are likely to be pleased with its laid-back fun. Even better, it will sell for a nice inexpensive price of $19.99. The game is due to land on store shelves this September.