Oh Nintendo you're so good to us. Flipnote Studio released and it is sweet and oh yeah FREE! Basically Flipnote is the digital equivalent of drawing little exploding guy cartoons in the bottom corner your history book, not that I ever did such a thing! After I stopped jumping up and down because I didn't have to shell out any precious points for the game I was shocked with all of the available options. Although it is just a simple drawing program Nintendo provides players, or artists in this case, with a tons of tricks to speed up the process of animation.
Here's a quick run down of what tools you get. The basics are draw, paint and erase each with eight options for size, texture and pattern. There are three color options red, blue and black(or white if you choose black “paper”). I guess I need to go into that further you can have white or black background which sort of looks like a negative. The coolest and most useful feature is the lightbox which gives you a ghost image of the previous cell for you to work from. There is also a copy feature which does, as you probably suspect, copies the previous cell onto the next cell, it works well for dramatic pauses or slight changes. The advanced tools allow you to copy and paste selected items, resize or flip your image in a cell. You can also make the brushes larger and slide things around using the L button. There are tons of little tricks you can employ like drawing straight lines by holding down the start or select button as you draw, I know big whoop straight lines but it's impossible to do other wise. Oh yeah and you can add sounds and music to your creation too!
Nintendo has made it really easy to save and share your animations. By selecting an animation and tapping the post option, of course you have to agree to the terms blah blah blah, then your cartoon is posted to the Hatena website. The Hatena site is a gallery of people's animations which can be accessed via computer or DSi. Hatena is divided into categories which makes it much easier to find what you're looking for.
I have to admit I thought Flipnote would get old fast but nope I am hopelessly addicted! And of course you just can not beat the price. Although Flipnote is not a game it is an absolute must if you have a DSi.
