Based on Crap: The Worst Things to Make Nintendo Games About.

You have a limited time to spell out what the drawing's supposed to be. Almost all of it will be spent running the little feet from one side of the alphabet to the other. It's a lot like at the presidential debates where each candidate has 60 seconds to make a point only has to do 20 jumping jacks between each word.

As for this particular picture, there wasn't enough letters for "TOILET-SHAPED BARBECUE", so I don't know what the hell it's supposed to be.

There are a lot of things you can simulate with a Nintendo. The life of a brave paperboy, a commando's infiltration into a P.O.W. camp, maybe a jet fighter pilot's daring dogfight with nazi UFOs. Not Pictionary. The one thing you don't need to make a video game about is a board game. Motherfucker, I have a board game. I don't have a fighter jet. If you want to play a board game, it's over there in the closet under four feet of dust, the lawn darts, and the guitar you thought you'd one day learn to play. There is no reason to transfer it over to the Nintendo.

If you're going to make a Nintendo game about a board game, at least make it better than the original. Like Chutes and Ladders that can cure cancer or a Monopoly game that gives you a blowjob. And they should have known from the beginning that Nintendo Pictionary is going to be worse than regular Pictionary since you're going to be drawing with a clunky ass Nintendo controller and screaming out your solution guesses by slowly selecting from a menu of letters. Someone should have stood up in the first board meeting and said, "Are you sure we shouldn't make a game about punching people? This is going to be like playing Pictionary only you're all fucked up. Not fucked up drunk. Fucked up like you're a mute and your friend is drawing pictures by rubbing paint on his chest and running himself into the pad of paper."


In 1989, Nintendo Power was so excited about the release of Pictionary that they had a creature riding a four-wheeler announce it. The four-wheeler's name was SUSIE. If you hold your breath long enough it starts to make sense.
They must have figured out a faithful version of the game would never work, so they modified it. Instead of you drawing pictures and having yourself guess what they are, you're a can of spray paint on a giant game board. When you land on a space, you have to unlock parts of a picture by playing mini arcade games. Like a bad version of upside-down Space Invaders, or two firemen saving fat guys from a burning building. One is an astronaut hopping from one platform to another to collect things; it would be just like Super Mario Brothers if the brothers never left the inside of an elevator and the only thing they had to fight was pink tennis balls.

All the mini games are basically things you could play on a wristwatch. Those aren't so bad if you're in the back of class, but this is a Nintendo cartridge. It doesn't have the excuse of being a game on a wristwatch. So by the end, it's not really Pictionary at all. I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I bet the legal rights to call this crap Pictionary cost them at least a few thousand dollars. They could have named the game Boring Astronaut Hop and used some of that money to buy a programmer without a birth defect, or at least spent it on the rights to call the game something cool like Spider-Man vs. Gi-Joe & Buck Rogers. That title has as much to do with the game they made as "Pictionary" anyway.

The fun of Pictionary doesn't come from guessing what things are. If guessing was fun, you'd stand over the toilet after a night of drinking and try to figure out what all the chunks originally were. I think that was a hot dog! And before that, processed rat organs! Guessing reminds us too much of our education. Looking at a bizarre image drawn by a person who refuses to tell you what it is reminds me of when I skipped Biology for three months and showed up for the final. I labelled the stages of cell division as Start, Middle, Later, and Spaceship.

So the appeal can't be the guessing part. Most people get the Mexican channel, and after a few minutes, you get tired of trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. They'll have a puppet announcing an event where kids in capes throw cottage cheese at each other in a wading pool, and you'll give up. Whatever those people are doing, you don't want to know. That's how this game is. The pictures you're supposed to identify are as confusing as Latin television programming, but with way fewer tits.


No offense, LJN, but I've filled out forms that are more fun than this.
The real fun of Pictionary comes from seeing inside your crazy friends' heads. You can learn a lot about someone by what they scream out during the middle of a game. One guy will be spaztically scribbling some nonsense while he periodically turns to you nodding and opening his eyes really wide like it will help you see the insides of his brain. Then while you're guessing things like "Volcano!" or "Milkshake!" the craziest shit you ever heard will come out of your friend's mouth. He'll jump up and scream, "My uncle sneaking into my bedroom and showing me his penis!" And when the dude drawing desperately puts some more lines on it, your friend will change his guess to, "Oh! Oh! My uncle's penis in a racecar!"

Graphics: 2
I've never played Pictionary with a retarded person with Parkinson's Disease, but after trying to figure out what the hell my Nintendo was drawing, I think I have a pretty good idea of what it's like.

Fun: 1
It's a depressing game. Just by putting it in the Nintendo you're sort of admitting that you don't have any friends to play Pictionary with. And if anyone finds out you played the Nintendo version, that's not going to help your popularity. Remember this lonely kids: there's no law that limits the number of times you can masturbate in one day. If you have to simulate activities you'd normally do with other people, at least make it sex instead of board games. Have some self respect.



The perfect party game for you and Brian Michaels! The Pictionary ROM

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