Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter Hands-On Impressions

When the first Drawn to Life was released on the Nintendo DS in 2007, we wondered why the Wii missed out on a chance to get in on the action. Wii Remote waggling seemed the perfect partner for slopping paint around on your television in place of canvas, and the game offered clean indoor finger painting for adults and kids.

Today at E3 2009 we had the chance to finally pick up the brush and wave it around in a painty mess without getting our hands dirty. Being late to make its debut on Nintendo's family friendly console isn't necessarily a bad thing, with Planet Moon picking up the palette in place of the game's original creator, 5th Cell (which is still working on the DS version). Being late to the party also gives the team an opportunity to refine and expand on the original design. Some of the big new features include hidden and unlockable stamps (a la LittleBigPlanet) that you can use you spice up your characters and environments. Demo guides also told us that there will be at least four items awarded per level, giving you plenty of options when you want to let your creative juices flow. Another is the option to move the animation contact points on your hero, and though you'll still need to modify a bipedal template, you can turn your character into a giant crocodilian creature, use arms for ears to create rabbits, or finally live out that dream of making a race of crazy dog people.

Just because the game's hook is the ability to draw the game that you want to play and customise your own characters, weapons, and environments from the ground up, doesn't mean that they're going to force you to do it. If you're not confident in your ability to draw, then you can select from a series of templates. A total of 30 characters will be available, and as you unlock items, you'll be able to replace your Picasso clouds with something premade and a little less abstract.

Our hands-on time was on the Sky Arch Mountains level and gave us a chance to try out the platforming and drawing aspects of the game. Getting around is simply a case of pointing using the analog stick on the Wii Nunchuk and tapping or double-tapping A to double-jump obstacles. Early in the game you'll be attacking using just your fists, but we had no trouble whaling on giant bats that blocked our path before we had access to weapons.

We came across various coloured boxes in our travels, and each denotes the type of drawn item that you'll be able to input to keep moving. Black outlines are simple cosmetic objects such as flowers to give the environment a distinctive personal touch. These can be done at leisure by hitting the C button on the Nunchuk and bringing up the in-game easel. Blue boxes are sticky and will let you create floating simple items such as platforms to traverse gaps, whereas red boxes allow for dynamic physics calculations and will fall and move depending on the shapes that you create and how they fit in the space. In one example, we used a floating red box to create a giant octagonal boulder that fell from the sky, rolled down a steep ramp, and killed a giant ape, letting us loot his sweet, sweet gold-coin stash. We'll reserve judgement on the game's antisimian stance until we play some more.

Another new addition is dynamically generated animated images. Here your flat 2D object will be transformed into something a little more active. Our example was a set of wings that we created using a pair of circles. Once attached to our character, they animated and let us fly to reach inaccessible areas.

Planet Moon is remaining tight-lipped on the game's story, but we were told to expect something revolving around missing objects in the world and the obvious need to replace them to save the day. Characters Jowee, Mari, and Pirate Beard from the first game are all set to rejoin the cast when the game launches in the last quarter of this year.

Stay tuned for GameSpot's ongoing coverage from E3 2009.