So, PictoChat not doing anything for you? Need a little more personality in your Nintendo DS instant messaging? THQ's got something that they hope will beef up the chatting community on the Nintendo DS with its 'launch window' title, Ping Pals, developed by the Shantae GBC crew at WayForward. We first got wind of the program at Nintendo's Gamers Summit in Seattle early in October, and we've been able to put in a bit more time with the near-final product a couple weeks before it ships...currently scheduled for December 7th.
Honestly, don't expect a huge gaming production out of this one. It's really just going for a more elaborate way of chatting on the Nintendo DS using the touch screen for its interface. But it adds an incentive that encourages people to be social in Ping Pals by rewarding chatters with coins to 'purchase' items that can be used to customize that person's avatar icon. Everyone with a copy of the game has their own on-screen persona, completely customized with accessories that make for near infinite possibilities.
Players earn coin by playing simple games that use the chat interface. There's a 'Pictionary' game where one player must draw doodles to make the other players guess the specific word. The faster someone answers, the higher the reward to the doodler and the person who answered the question. There's also a 'hot potato' game where a bomb is sent to a random person, and he or she must type 'bomb' or 'pass' to send the bomb to another person in the network. The person with the bomb when it explodes, loses. Ping Pals also has hidden 'money words' that, when entered and sent to anyone in the network chain, will reward players with a heap of cash for their shopping bank roll. Items that can be purchased range from common to extremely rare, and some items can only be purchased on a specific day...using the system's internal clock to trigger the goods. PictoChat will even utilize the player's entered birthday to reward some additional extras.
If players can't find anyone to talk to within the wireless range of their DS, they can chat with computer AI people, holding conversations by answering yes or no questions as if these people were actually being controlled by a DS system nearby. Ping Pals offers a couple of single player chat games: a high/low game where players pick a number from 1 to 10, or a 'Family Feud' style trivia game where they'll have to guess ten different words pertaining to a specific subject offered by the computer chatter.
Ping Pals supports the DS system's download feature so that people without a copy of the cartridge can join in the chatting fun. The only downside is that the owner of the cartridge has to leave a chat session in order to trigger the program available to people without the game. If that owner was hosting the chat room for other players, it will sever the connection for those already chatting. On the plus side, the downloaded file can sit in memory for as long as the player keeps their system on. They're free to jump in and out of conversations as if they own the cartridge. But they won't be able to alter their avatar, nor will they be able to earn coin to buy stuff. |
|小黑屋|手机版|Archiver|Nw壬天堂世界
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发表于 2004-11-30 01:07:28
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