Pictochat with avatars!

If you read the title thinking that this game is a good one, you thought wrong. Ping Pals is essentially the embedded program Pictochat (on the DS's main menu), except you can use avatars and "upgrade" it with clothes. In addition to text and doodling, you can change the color of the ink. That's about it.

Anyways, the game uses a few default settings from your DS hardware, like your user name and the current time and date. If it's a common holiday, more likely than not the game will celebrate it with a two-sentence commemoration. If you're lucky, you might even get some money to spend on clothing or background music.

During single-player (what kind of idea was that, anyway?), you can "talk" to NPC's, who only ask yes/no questions. During single player, there's this feature called money words. If you send one of these money words, you get rewarded, but the words can only be used once. It's kind of a weird concept. Also, when you're done talking to the NPC, you get a few coins to spend.

In multiplayer mode, you can download the game to others and "play" with them. You can choose about 2 games to play, or just talk normally. This wears off after a while, and my friends and I would normally just retreat back to Pictochat.

One other thing in the game is the shop. Obviously you can buy clothing for your avatar, but there's also backgrounds, background music and sound effects, all apart of a theme. The items get pretty pricey, because you need to make a lot of money to buy the things you want. One way to make money is to sell your items to your friends, assuming they have enough money and a copy of the game.

Overall, you're really not doing yourself very much good by getting this game. If you find it, please avoid it for the sake of humanity (or just your budget).