PictoChat Unlockables (DS)

PictoChat is a communication utility made by Nintendo in order to facilitate a better understanding and interaction among the users of its hugely popular Nintendo DS handheld devices. Being pre-loaded on any DS, DS Lite and DSi version of the portable console, it has made communication between individuals a very pleasant experience, winning an Excellence Prize for Entertainment at the 2004 Japan Media Arts Festival.

The utility allows for up to sixteen people to paint chat with each other via the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection, which makes it possible for them to be online anywhere they can. PictoChat boasts a simple input of keyboard text and written text or drawings, thus offering anyone the chance to communicate with friends and family over the Internet.

The characters are inputted by the touch screen of the Nintendo DS, which displays either an on-screen keyboard, or a blank canvas that can be used by people to draw and send pictures made by them. The keyboard provides enough Latin and Asian characters for it to properly display all of the languages supported by the system: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Four chat rooms are available at one time, each with the capacity of relating sixteen people to each other, meaning that a maximum of 64 people are given the possibility to communicate.

PictoChat also has other uses, with a lot of players creating short animations by drawing individual pictures on the DS' touch screen and sending them frame by frame to the message board displayed on the top screen. The animator can then press and hold down both shoulder buttons for the images to scroll at 7.5 frames per second, thus creating a viewable animation.

UNLOCKABLES

Birthday greeting
Enter a chat room on the date that you have registered as your birthday in the system settings. The message "Happy Birthday! Today is <your name's> birthday!" will appear.

Christmas greeting
Enter a chat room on December 25th.

Here's a video of this application running on a Nintendo DSi: