U-Draw

Photo from Venture Beat.com

Finally, a gaming oddities that I actually owned (sadly...)! When I was younger I bought it, and thought it was pretty cool, but after no game store would except it, I left it at a school. But what exactly is the U-draw? Is it a precursor to the Wii U, a device for drawing, or a glorified slab with a pen attached? I'll say only one of them is true...

This monster of a device was released in 2010 for the Wii, before the chaos was unleashed for the Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2011. Its main gimmick was that you could hook it up and draw things on it. This would be fine in concept, but the control was so centered on the pen that games were almost exclusively designed around it. Although the Wii version was somewhat of a success, the other versions were failures. After doing some "scientific" research, I came across a game know simply as "Disney Animator". This mysterious title was said to be the device's "killer app". Sadly, the beacon of hope that that game could have been was never released, and soon after, the company who made it was picking up its bags. Nothing of the game was ever shown...

Enough rambling, lets get to the meat of this metaphorical sandwich! Everyone wants to know what it was like, and I think 3 words sum it up perfectly: Surprisingly Not Trash (TM). The Wii version came with Udraw Studio. This was an art game, were the only goal was to DRAW (this may be too intense for some of you)! The game was ok. It got all the basic points that an art program should hit, but was about as lacking in depth as a bag of chips lacks in actual chips. That, and the fact that the pack-in game was the $90 dollar equivalent of a pen and paper. There were other games, but I only remember having 2 others. One was Pictionary. It wouldn't be that bad, but there was no 1 player option, so I rarely played it. The other one was based on the TV show The Penguins Of Madagascar, or as I call it: The Spin Off That Nobody Asked For Of Madagascar. It was ok, and you controlled the characters by moving the pen. The game was ok at best.

So what do I think of the U-Draw? I'm sure your asking that. Well, I think that it was an invention to serve a need that wasn't there. When you can emulate the whole device with just a pen and paper, I don't see a desire to buy it. The other games weren't impressive, and no hardcore gamer would touch it with a 50 foot stick. Would I recommend you buy one? Heck no...