Flipnote Studio (Hands-On) (Nintendo DS) Preview

Despite being tucked away in a corner at Nintendo's post-E3 event, Flipnote Studio is a great little application that has the added bonus of being free upon release, as announced in the last couple of days. It invites players to draw and create animations of whatever they like using flipbook-esque animations. Each stage of your creation must be sketched out frame by frame with subtle differences upon each subsequent picture so that fluid animation is delivered upon playback. Enough with the scant explanation of animation, though - how well does the DS handle it? It would be fair to have doubts given that Pictochat never gave the best results, and the picture quality is the same here - that is to say, it's tricky to get a brilliant outcome unless you put a little effort in.

It's clear that there is potential, though. My own efforts equated to little more than a grinning emoticons that slowly grew fangs and chomped about a bit, like a mildly scary Pac-Man who has spent too much time eating 'power pills' and stumbling about in discos - funny enough, but not with any real artistic merit. Luckily, Nintendo played it smart by hiring an artist for the event who bravely sat there poking at the DS all day and coming up with things that actually looked like proper drawings that somebody would be happy with, which goes to show that not everybody is as crap at drawing on a touch screen as I am.

The setup is pretty basic. You can flick between your different frames and manually draw each, or you can duplicate previously drawn frames for easier modification, and once you're happy with your piece you can immediately play it back. There are also a number of effects to overlay, such as inverting colour, and you can speed up and slow down your creation to suit. That's just for the basic animation, however, which is the only section I got to try out; you can also share creations and download those made by others, import pictures from the DSi photo channel, record sound and music with the microphone to accompany your images, and even use it as an electronic notebook.