Art Alive

"Use paintbrush instead"

Wow talk about a bad idea. Trying to do a gamer like art attack on the limited genesis with its smallish palette and tiny ram was just a bad idea form the start. I'm sure you can guess what the game is trying to emulate. Yes its Paintbrush (now MS Paint) the free painting program that has come with every MS Windows since 3.0 and has a great interface with easy to understand icons and an online help as well as being on a computer that has a hard drive to save your creations. Let's run down the feature set to see if this game is better than Paintbrush.

Graphics

Paintbrush: Slick interface with easy to understand buttons and many tools. Hover tool tips show what each thing does and online help system is available for detailed information about usage techniques. Good array of colours and if you like you can create your own colours and save them for later use.

Art Attack: Lame collection of boring and nondescript colours with some ugly patterns thrown in too. Terrible interface with cryptic icons and it's often hard to tell what is going on let alone what the icons are for. Entire interface looks blocky, low res and is really an eyesore.

Sound

Paintbrush: No sound at all but pleasant windows noises and mp3s playing if desired.

Art attack: Bright tune that you pretty much never hear except when drawing meaning you'll hear the first five seconds of it over and over.

Control

Paintbrush: Steady, intuitive mouse control offers freedom & accuracy

Art attack: A few cursor speeds that are either too fast or too slow and a D-pad completely unsuited to drawing anything. Have to keep switching between awful interface and page constantly

Gameplay

Paintbrush: Lets you draw pictures. With the many tools and options this can be fun. All pictures can be saved in many formats for use with many different things and can be saved easily and quickly. Opening saved files is fast and simple.

Art attack Lets you attempt to draw pictures With the shoddy controls awful interface and ugly colours you'll be sick of it in seconds. Pictures cannot be used for anything and the only way to save them is via a video player, an incredibly clumsy and crappy way of saving a picture. The only way to restore a picture is to play the saved video back and see it didn't save properly.

Reply

Paintbrush: Is only a few clicks away for a quick doodle and is fun to muck around with

Art attack: If you happen to create something nice the save system will make you hate it.

As you can see a mega drive cartridge that these people expected money for has absolutely nothing over a free program that has come with windows for years. Don't play this “game” Fire up paint brush instead!

Fin.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 05/26/09

Game Release: Art Alive (US, 01/01/91)