THQ's uDraw Tablet (and uDraw: Instant Artist) - Part 1/3 of a Pie Reviews Special

[Elliot]

THQ's uDraw Tablet was originally released on the Nintendo Wii back in November of 2010. It met with modest success for the publisher, and following this the decision was made to move the device over to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This version released a year after the original version in November of 2011 with a total of three compatible games, one of which was included with the tablet. After four months of production, the device was discontinued on all platforms in February of this year, leaving a grand total of 1.4 million unsold units and a sixty million dollar operating loss for the beginning of 2012, and is likely a large contributing factor to THQ's recent financial troubles and threats of NASDAQ delisting.

Today, in this week's special edition of Pie Reviews, I'm going to be looking at the device itself and the games released for it, namely uDraw Studio: Instant Artist, Pictionary: Ultimate Edition and Marvel Super Hero Squad: Comic Combat.

The Hardware

The tablet comes packaged with a copy of uDraw Studio: Instant Artist and cleverly embedded in the battery compartment to prevent it from getting lost is the USB receiver (alongside three empty AA-battery shaped holes the device requires you fill yourself). It has an on-off slider and a button to sync the device to the PS3 once the receiver is plugged in on the back, and on the front is its input panel which measures exactly 16 by 9 centimetres (about 6.3 by 3.5 inches) to match the 16:9 widescreen format of the vast majority of modern TV screens. The pen holder is directly above, to the left are the PS button, Start, Select and a D-pad and to the right are the Cross, Circle, Square and Triangle buttons.

The pen is attached to the device by a wire that sticks out of the back that's about 30 centimetres long, and has the unfortunate habit of getting caught round the side of the device, trapping the pen until it is released. The device is almost entirely black – matte on the back and glossy on the front – after about five minutes of use it will be covered in fingerprint smudges. It has indents on the back akin to those of the Vita, letting you hold the device comfortably at each side.

The build quality of the tablet is surprisingly good – there's absolutely no give in it when you try and flex it, making it sturdier than Sony's official Sixaxis and Dualshock 3 pads. It's got a good weight to it, and it seems to be not too hungry on battery life – in the approximately 18 to 20 hours I spent with it, I never had to change the batteries I put in it. The accelerometer works adequately well and on the surface seems no worse (though it's certainly no better) than that of the official Sony controllers. The D-pad and buttons are most similar to those on the PSP, and they're also extremely comfortable to use – they feel sturdy and feel good to press.

Where the real problems with the uDraw tablet begin is when it tries to be a tablet. The pen is very oddly shaped, getting thicker near the nib, and the nib itself is ridiculously huge making precise inputs extremely difficult to pull off. The cursor on screen will only follow the pen if it is making contact with the panel, otherwise it will jump to your hand which is likely resting on the input panel (for comparison, most graphics tablets will track the pen whilst it hovers a good centimetre or so above the surface of the tablet). To actually activate the pen, it needs to be pressed down reasonably firmly, but the nib squidges into the body of the pen uncomfortably when it's pressed. The pen seems to drop some inputs seemingly at random, and behaves erratically sometimes. Compared to something like my two year old Wacom Bamboo tablet, this feels horrible to use.

As an aside, the tablet recognises fingers as input but not arbitrary objects so clearly the input panel is capacitive, yet the pen isn't merely a capacitive stylus, nor does it work in the same way as the Wacom Bamboo pen I have works, as neither pen works on the other's tablet. It seems likely that method the pen uses to recognise presses was used for cost-cutting rather than because it's technologically superior.

Information on the launch price of the uDraw is actually quite hard to come across in the UK as the price was slashed on release, but from a little research I get the impression that this thing launched with a recommended retail price of £70 in the UK and $80 in the US. For what you're getting, this is poor. My Wacom Bamboo tablet, two years ago in the primitive age of 2010, was less than £40 and it's superior as a tablet in every way, and this is, at its core, what the uDraw is. If the tablet were competently executed, the buttons and accelerometer could have been done away with, because a strong, well-made tablet input device would have opened up so many interesting avenues for console gaming. However, with the massively inflated launch price this was a rip-off. It's almost worth picking one up as a curio given that they've fallen to far less than £20 (or $20) now, but if you're just looking for fun rather than an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful experiment, then avoid it, as there really is little fun to be had here.

uDraw Studio: Instant Artist

Instant Artist, a game developed by Pipeworks Software (the previous work of theirs that you're most likely to be familiar with is the opening animations for the Xbox family of consoles) and published, of course, by THQ, was chosen as the pack-in game for the tablet. Its main mode is an art studio complete with different tools and brushes to use in the creation of pictures, and it contains a handful of other modes which use the tablet in various different ways.

The experience of using the art studio is not a particularly good one for various reasons. Firstly, the tablet does not (unlike other, cheaper tablets – like my Bamboo – for PC) recognise the angle that you're holding the pen to the device at, so a lot of variety and subtlety of brushstrokes is lost, as it's impossible to, for example, turn the thick end of the highlighter or calligraphy tool around by rotating the pen, etc. Fortunately, it does recognise different levels of pressure and there are one or two tools which will use this information to change the way they draw on screen, but for the most part this is completely ignored and you'd be forgiven for not even realising that it is pressure sensitive. The colour palette is a hassle to use, as it only allows you to have six colours easily accessible at once and there's a fairly confusing and clunky menu system involved with switching colours on the palette. Zooming in and out is done with either pinch controls using two fingers, or up and down on the D-pad and both feel imprecise. Undo support is included and seems to be able to undo quite a number of actions which is pleasing.

Of course, the problems for real world use really arise when you want to do such outlandish things as import and export images (not to mention that saving and loading an image is painfully, embarrassingly slow). Importing and touching up is simply impossible as far as I can tell, and to export you must go through an arduous process of uploading it to THQ's servers (there's a trophy for this, by the way, but the servers are still up), getting a code that will let you retrieve the image then going to the World of uDraw website and downloading your picture from there. What would have been wrong with exporting pictures to the XMB, like several other games manage competently?

Given that last I checked most Wacom tablets come with an art studio program called Art Rage 2, which isn't system intensive at all, so it should run on almost every PC, and has a far better set of functionality than uDraw Studio, it would be absolutely impossible to recommend it for this purpose.

Other drawing-based modes included are a tutorial mode in which an annoying man called Remmy (sic) teaches you some basic techniques of how to draw, paint and such, but it's nothing that you couldn't get by having a judicious Google search for “watercolour tutorial” or such, which would, in all likelihood, be delivered in a less annoying format. Hell, I'd recommend watching The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross over playing these tutorials, you'd likely have a lot more fun. There's also a paint-by-numbers mode and a join-the-dots mode, but I'd wager your kids would have a lot less fun with this than they would if you just bought them a bloody colouring book. It'd certainly mean a lot less tedious loading screens.

There are three non-art modes available too. Firstly, a Whac-A-Mole style game where you prod aliens with your pen to splat them, which is far too easy and incredibly tedious, having three varieties of aliens and the same boss after each of the ten levels. Secondly, a mode that uses the accelerometer to move a ball around and collect colours whilst avoiding holes, that's drably presented and also very boring. Finally, the mode which is the most fun in the entire game, a Labyrinth style game that has you rushing through mazes using the accelerometer, avoiding the holes and getting to the end as fast as possible. Whilst this is fun, it's worth noting that this could have been made just as well using the Sixaxis' motion sensing (and had THQ just turned out a game with a good hundred more mazes and some more gameplay variety this would have made a very solid PSN title, given that there's not been a PS3 Super Monkey Ball), so it does nothing to justify your purchase of the tablet.

Ultimately, the entire collection is a somewhat half-arsed collection of things you could do better and cheaper with a Wacom tablet on your computer, mixed in with some mostly dull mini-games that could have been done better with a Sixaxis.

[Elliot]

And I give you: Kevinnummer1 on this game:

[ShadowGandalf]

I bought this a while back, because I love drawing. The tablet wasn't like i expected though. I found even simple things like drawing a circle to be difficult. I never found the undo feature either, where was that? Would've come in handy numerous times.

The mazes and tilt painting were frustrating too. Very frustrating. Some of the mazes between 31 and 40 took 50+ attempts. I wouldn't really recommend this either. Oh yeah, and the gallery was super slow to load. Only displaying 4 pieces, it'd take up to 20 seconds to load them in. I traded the thing in after getting Platinum.