The Hall of Shame 08.13.08: Pictionary (NES)

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 08.13.2008

I'm no artist, but apparently neither were the developers.

When it comes to making video games based off board games or game shows, it's quality usually depends on whether or not you really that game enough to pay for an electronics version of it. Some games make the transition well while others look like shovelware. Back in the NES days, a lot of those games would fall under the shovelware category like the one I'm inducting today.

At first Pictionary doesn't seem like the title that can transition well into a video game. I mean the whole fun of the game is to see how well you can accurately draw what you're given or see how people respond to your drawings, especially if they think you suck and then they get something much more easier then you and they SUCK at it (that was my best school day ever). But the game is doing the drawing for you, it just doesn't feel as fun. In fact, there's no fun to be had at all in Pictionary.


It's like Win Lose or Draw, with heavy emphasis on Lose

The way the video game is set up is that you have to play mini-games in order to get pieces for a picture. After the mini-game is over you have to guess what the picture is based on how much you uncovered. If you solve it you roll the dice and move across the board. Reach to the end of the board first and you win. So what's the problem with the game? The puzzles SUCK!

Trying to solve them is ridiculous. The mini-games are setup in such a way that it's very rare that you'll get all the pieces for the picture. There are only four mini-games: A fireman game where you run across back and forth catching people, A space invaders clone, some space jumping game, and one where you stack boxes and walk across without getting the boxes hit. The games show up at random so you'll probably be being the same one about five or six times in a row. Personally the game I hate the most is the Fireman one, because there are plenty of times where they'll have two people drop at the same time on the very opposite sides of the screen, and so one of them is guaranteed to fall. Every time a person falls, the timer gets drained and the game ends quicker. So really, I'd say the best you can hope for is 75% of the picture revealed. That wouldn't be so bad if the pieces you wound up getting wasn't a bunch of black squares. A lot of these puzzles Miss that all important arrow piece and you are screwed.

But let's say you play so well that you reveal 90 to 100 percent for the picture. Even when you see the actual picture, you're still going to get confused because they look so horrible or because it looked exactly like another picture and they were too lazy to come up with new ideas.

Here are only some of the worst examples I've seen:

Take a look at the two pictures in row 1. One is supposed to be an Oval and the other is an Egg, but they look too much alike to tell them apart. One of those pictures should've been taken out of the game.

Sometimes I wonder what the age group for this game would be. I think it's for the kids because some of the puzzles are too easy, and sometimes the puzzles look too complicated for any kid and some adults to know. Row 2 makes it seem like for kids.That's supposed to be a square and rectangle, though technically squares are rectangles. Row 5 however look like such garbled messes only adults would understand, and even then it's a challenge. The left picture is a lightning rod? How the hell does that thing look like a lightning rod?! The middle picture is wink but it's looks like a screwed up face. The one on the right however is the worst of them, because the most important part of the puzzle takes up about two or three squares, so you really have to get 90 to 100 percent of the puzzle to understand this. But even then I can barely understand what's that supposed to be. Know what it is?

A period. I think of way better things to represent a period.

Moving on, Row 3 shows how lazy the programmers were getting. The dollar sign is alright, but then they just run a line across it and call it profit. So they change very little and suddenly to them it's different? I'm just glad there isn't some kind of major third-party game company that does that to there games.

Row 4 shows that they can't decide whether or not they want to be good drawers or not. The left picture is a submarine, and it looks like crap. But the one on the right is a MUCH better picture of a submarine. So why couldn't they draw something like that for submarine?! I mean they were already recycling like ten of the same pictures in this game!

As for Row 6, that's supposed to be a shoulder, but it looks like another part of the body altogether. I'll let you figure it out for yourself.

As bad as those pictures were, none of them can compare to the ultimate piece of crap image that truly defines how horrible this game is. Take a look at the picture below and see if you can identify what it is:



Have you figured out what this picture looks like?

Right now you're probably thinking "What do you mean what it looks like? This isn't a picture! It's just blank!"

But that's the actual answer: BLANK!

Just who the hell were the people responsible for deciding what pictures got into the game and what didn't?! I mean, BLANK?! Seriously?! Did these idiots miss the entire damn point of the game? In Pictionary, you're supposed to draw the answer you have, and your partner tries to guess in order to score! But if you have the word "BLANK", how the hell are you supposed to draw that? By not drawing anything at all? If you're not drawing anything at all, then doesn't that DEFEAT THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF PICTIONARY IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

Here's another thing that gets on my nerves about this game: Sometimes when you guess the picture correctly, the words "You've played before!" will appear as a congratulatory response. I don't know whether to be annoyed or pissed off. I would be annoyed because if I got it right on the first try I'd like to think the game can acknowledge that I'm a decent player who doesn't need to replay the same puzzle so many times before getting it right, or I would be pissed off because sometimes playing the same puzzle multiple times is the only way to get it right since some of them make absolutely no sense or the damn timer ran out!

All this actually comes from one mode of the game. There's another mode where you can draw whatever you want, but given the bad controls for trying to draw a picture, you might as well just play the actual board game. In fact, you should always play the board game version rather then this crap.

Speaking of crap, last week somebody complained about how I shouldn't bash Shaq-Fu because apparently I can't make a better game. What this means is that nobody apparently is allowed to talk about or badmouth a game unless they can make one better, thus ruining the point of having game reviews in the first place. Either that or dipshit was a Shaq fanboy. I mean, he DEFENDED Shaq-Fu!

But because of that comment, this week I was inspired to do a semi-feature for this induction. While I won't make an NES game better then Pictionary (though it wouldn't really take much), I know one game that plays like Pictionary only it works MUCH better.



This is a game made by Rare called Anticipation. It's basically a Pictionary clone only it plays much better then the Pictionary video game. In this one you move around a game board and land on different colored squares. A pencil will then appear and start drawing something from connecting dots, and you have to guess what it is. Get it right and you earn a piece. Collect all the pieces on the board and you move up a level. Complete Level 3 and you win. The game gets harder when you go up the levels. Level 1 gives you dots that the pencil connects, you get a category and you're told how many letters are in the answer. Level 2 takes away the dots and the number of letters. Level 3 takes away the category, so it's get really challenging. Unlike Pictionary, the drawings are done MUCH better, there's no crappy mini-games, and the game will also warn you if you're wrong when you pick the wrong letter right away. The only flaw I see is that the die is used as a countdown for how much time you have left for taking a guess. So if you're quick you can roll a high number, but if you're slow you roll a low number. So sometimes in order to get a color piece you need, you have to time your guess accurately, and that can get a bit annoying.

But I'll take that slight bit of annoyance over the huge amount of annoyance from Pictionary any day.

*Special thanks to Daniel Engel who had all the Pictionary answers at GameFAQs