LOL - hands-on

Even if you don’t own any DS games, there’s always Pictochat, the built-in chat room feature that no one seems to ever use. Draw images (such as, say, a penis). Write words (such as, again, penis). There is so much untapped penis-related material to work with, but hardly anyone to share it with. Enter LOL, developer Agetec’s latest title that tries to transform sharing messages and drawings into a full fledged DS game.

LOL is a game built around competition. It is only multiplayer and seems to be as fun as your friends are. As the game's official motto states, "if the game's boring, you're boring," (so get some wittier friends). Fortunately, even though it is exclusively multiplayer, you only need one cart between the, as many as, four of you to play the game, since the rest can download it via local wi-fi.

Once the game has finished downloading, each player is given a blank screen and one player gets to write some sort of challenge or what have you for the players to complete and it will go in the top screen. Perhaps the challenge is drawing the cutest puppy, giving the best Futurama quote, or naming the President of Uganda. Anything that fits on the screen is fair game.

Then each player answers (even the one who posed the question originally) in an amount of time chosen by the question’s creator. Once everyone has answered, democracy takes center stage.

Each player who participated gets three votes to award the replies. This can lead to the most creative response winning even if it's wrong. Old personal grudges may also play their part. A friend you owe $150 to may not want to vote for your drawing, for example. Thus politics rears its ugly head, which is half the fun. Once the winner is chosen, that person creates the next question and the game begins again.

It may seem cheap on the outside, and it is. LOL will sell for about twenty bucks, but the game has some real possibilities for fun. The only place that seems to be carrying LOL at the time of writing is the Agetecwebsite. Still, we wouldn't mind another round with LOL, so long as we aren't the butt of anyone's jokes.

Apr 24, 2008

Henry Gilbert

Henry Gilbert is a former GamesRadar+ Editor, having spent seven years at the site helping to navigate our readers through the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation. Henry is now following another passion of his besides video games, working as the producer and podcast cohost of the popular Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon podcasts.