uDraw GameTablet
Only if u learn to spell first.
Once you've finished your artwork, you can sit back and watch a replay of it being created if you're tediously self-involved, or save it to the SD card as a JPEG. It's a surprisingly addictive process – the drawing, not the saving to an SD card, which is distinctly lacking in visceral thrills – and the important things all work: there's a nice zoom for detailed etchings and mistakes are very easy to rectify.
While there's a little lag between the pen movement and what's happening on screen, it won't confuse you or muck up your drawings too much. You can tell the delay is there, but you'll be able to accommodate it pretty easily. We'll know more about the lag in a few months, when Rich Leadbetter constructs working AI routines for several Renaissance masters and gets their opinions on THQ's device from beyond the grave. Stay tuned.
Beyond uDraw Studio, the publisher's already getting games together for the tablet, too. Dood's Big Adventure sees you playing through a series of simple platform levels with the device, directing your character by using the pen as a mouse pointer, and interacting with him by drawing trampolines to get him over spikes, spinning fans to loft him through the sky, or by tilting the tablet itself to gust him to safety. Bringing back pleasant memories of Drawn to Life, you'll be able to sketch on textures for most of the in-game characters along the way.
Pictionary, meanwhile, is, well, Pictionary, albeit Pictionary recreated as a kind of game show, in which up to four teams engage in tense scribble-offs, often with random rules imposed which could see them sketching without being allowed to watch what they're doing on the TV, or without lifting the pen from the tablet. (Pictionary's approach to handing out objectives, interestingly, relies on an honour system, with everyone agreeing not to peek at the screen when a new card is drawn. It's effectively doomed in my house.)
uDraw is an odd idea, then, but potentially quite an interesting one. While it's not something professional artists are likely to want to mess around with, it's worth remembering that most of us aren't professional artists anyway. If you're thinking that the last thing you need for your Wii is another peripheral, this might just be the device that changes your mind. If you're thinking, "Why does nobody use the word sepia-ification anymore?" however, I'm right there with you – and so is Sylvester Stallone.