"Almost useless, yet still fun to futz with..."

I don't know whose idea it was to create a chat program for the DS when it already came with one. Yet, someone did think of it, and Ping Pals is that bad idea. Right when the game came out, I stated that I'd only buy it when it dropped down to five dollars. Well, I saw it new in a K-Mart for $3. No joke. So that's how I picked this game up.

Despite what some people say, it's not a complete disaster. It's just severely lacking in utility. What this game is is a knock-off of PictoChat. Unlike PictoChat, however, it's not a pure chatting application. You've got a customizeable avatar which I'm pretty sure is referred to as a Ping Pal.

These Ping Pals can be customised by buying clothes, hats, hairstyle, et al. for them. How do you buy the items? With coins, the game's currency. So how do you actually earn these coins? Well, there are a few ways...

You get an allowance of coins every so often. Of course, this is a pittance of coins. So how do you make more money? You do one of the minigames featured in the game. There are several minigames in here that you can play. One of them is a variation of the "guess what number I'm thinking of" theme- guess the number the guy is thinking and you'll get lots of coins. If you guess close to it, you'll get a few less, and if you guess too far away you may end up even losing coins.

Then there is a game called Top 10, where you have to name ten things on a list. You have a theme like countries or colors, and every time you guess one, you get a few more coins. Then, there's a solo-chat option where you can chat with the computer, albeit only with yes or no answers...aw, heck, who am I kidding Half the crap you can do in this game could be done with a pen, paper, and another person. Yet therein lies the fun of the game. While there's not much to do, what is there is fun...for a while.

The score for this game should really be 4.5. However, I had to round it up for the GameFAQs rating system. There's no one I could really reccomend this game to, however. Only buy if you can find it for a low enough price...like $3. Even then, I can't reccomend it.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/06