One of the many money drains in the world.

User Rating: 2 | Ping Pals DS
Ping Pals is an upgrade to the ever so lovable and free Picto-Chat. The Bonus to this game is a personal avatar, NPC's to talk to when your feeling lonely, and a couple of games you can play single player, and a couple of other games you can only play multiplayer. Did I mention that this game doesn't have a sleep function either? Terrible, truly terrible. According to the game manual and I quote "There's always something new happening 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round." Well I'm not seeing anything new three days after I started this thing, where is all this new stuff your telling me about?

When I first looked at the game, I figured it might actually be fun to play around with, what attracted me was the personalized anime like avatars. While I had some fun with it at first, and enjoyed one of the mini games, it quickly got repetitive, and soon became boring and tedious. What you get with this game is pretty much what you would find in Picto-Chat with several perks. You can change the interface to specific themes (which you have to buy with coins), you can change the theme of your keyboard, and your chat window follows whatever theme you set the interface to, as well you can also make an avatar by equipping clothing to it (which you also have to buy with coins).

The game graphics are an actual plus to this game, and is the fluff part that anyone would enjoy. They aren't anything super special, but they make the game convincing to play, which I am sure the developer is using to draw in consumers. As for the sound, it is also fairly good, as even the beeps are smooth enough to listen to, and the music can be changed and doesn't often become something you can't stand to listen to anymore. And lastly, this game isn't very hard to play, the extent of the difficulty is a guessing game that tends to repeat itself sometimes.

Overall this is a game that will sit on my shelf and collect dust for many years to come. Though the avatar art gave me a few ideas with my own projects I will probably never touch this game again. It isn't worth the $15 that it looks it might be, save your money for something with more substance, even if it isn't flashy, after all when it comes to games, it is all about content, and this game certainly isn't packing any.

Gameplay: 1
Graphics: 7
Sound: 7
Overall: 2.0