Kirby: Canvus Curse E3 2005 Preshow Hands-On

What's a Nintendo handheld system without every member of the company's pantheon starring in at least one action game? So it is that Kirby: Canvas Curse comes before us starring the eponymous adorable wad of pink fluff. All is not well for Kirby this go-around, though--an evil witch has turned all the lands into paintings and worked Kirby over pretty bad, too. You'll have to take up your magical paint brush and delve into the paintings to restore everything to order and stop the villain once and for all.

If you've spent much time around a DS before, you could describe Canvas Curse as Yoshi's Touch & Go with more game attached. The conceit is certainly similar: Use your magic brush (read: stylus) to draw lines on the screen that will direct an ever-moving main character away from danger and toward the goal. Except in this case, you're drawing rainbows, not clouds. And this isn't Yoshi; it's Kirby. Most importantly, this simple but appealing mechanic is attached to fully featured platformer-style levels that will test your reflexes and ingenuity in equal measure, if what we saw is indicative of the full product.

As mentioned, this isn't just any regular old Kirby--now he's become a perfect pink ball, and he'll be careening one direction or another at all times, requiring you to keep on your toes with the line-drawing to keep him out of trouble. Just like in Touch & Go, you can draw lines on the screen that will direct where Kirby rolls. You can make a barrier to reverse his direction, a ramp to get him over a chasm, or a shield to prevent projectiles or enemies from hitting him. You'll have to be judicious with your lines, though, since you have a finite amount of rainbow paint to draw lines with. Your paint bucket fills back up quickly, but it also depletes just as fast if you're drawing a lot.

It wouldn't be a Kirby game if the little pink puffball couldn't harness enemies' powers for his own use. Since this is a Kirby game, luckily he can. You can tap Kirby himself to make him speed up and go smashing into a nearby enemy, which will confer that enemy's ability onto him. We saw electricity and flame powers in our demo, for instance, that helped us clear away blocks and other obstacles. You can also simply tap enemies with the stylus to stun them and then have Kirby knock them out, if you want.

Though it sounds pretty simple, Canvas Curse is a surprisingly fast-moving game, and at times it took all our line-drawing skills just to keep him from flying into any bottomless pits or running into enemy trouble. The game will contain seven distinct worlds with three levels each, and from what we saw, there will be a great degree of variety in the puzzles and backdrops you'll be presented with. We found our demo of Kirby: Canvas Curse to be action-packed and exciting, and we'll be interested to see if the full game can maintain that kind of momentum across its many levels. It's due out in June, so we'll be back with an answer sooner rather than later. Stay tuned.