To be clear, the problem isn’t the concept. Both versions of Poke Me! place the same monster in the center of a vertically-oriented screen-one for the iPhone and iPod touch, the other for the iPad-and you’re supposed to interact with him, making him walk across a 2-D environment and eat things.
Poke Me! is the followup to the company’s earlier Feed Me!, a great educational matching game that stars a hungry purple monster who you feed with the correct multiple-choice answer to a problem he’s dreaming of. iLounge Rating: A.īy comparison, we really wanted to like Edutainment Resources’ new Poke Me! and Poke Me! HD, but found ourselves profoundly disappointed with what appears-only after testing-to be a work in progress. Even without these additions, however, this is a truly great creative tool for kids. If we could expand it, we’d ask only for more of the stamping markers-currently three colors each of hearts, stars, bubbles, and dot-arcs-and the stickers, which let younger users create more interesting things than they could with finger-swipe painting and scribbling alone. It does exactly what it promises, is easy enough for a two-year-old to figure out, and is so aggressively priced that it’s hard to ask for much more functionality with a straight face. Like the company’s similarly great $1 Shape Builder, there’s just no excuse to skip this $2 title if the concept appeals to you or your child. What’s especially impressive about Drawing Pad is the pricing. This isn’t just some fourth-rate, slopped-together drawing tool actual expertise, balanced by a focus on kid-friendliness, brought these elements together. Multiple levels of undo and redo, activated with arrows, make it easy to reconsider your last addition or eraser-aided subtraction, stickers can be layered atop each other using actual layers, and the proper selection of the graphic you want to change is more accurate-even given multiple layers-than most other programs we’ve seen on Apple’s multi-touch devices. Though the application is streamlined for simplicity-the paintbrushes don’t have pressure or opacity controls, for instance, and only come in two sizes-there’s subtle sophistication behind the scenes. For younger kids, even the messes will be a ton of fun to create: a huge collection of vehicle, animal, face and flower stickers can be dropped, rotated, resized, and stamped different types of paper and photos from your gallery can be used as backdrops, and the drawing tools come in so many colors-attractively presented as scrolling images within a drawer that can be pulled out or hidden-that the single biggest challenge is in deciding what to use next. Depending on the child using Drawing Pad, however, this can be a good thing: the app’s paintbrushes, pencils, crayons, markers, shape stamps, and stickers can be used to create either beautiful, colorful compositions or completely chaotic messes, the latter sometimes easier to wipe away with a press of the Home button and reload of the app than going into the erasers menu and crumpling up the page to begin anew. If there’s anything to criticize in Darren Murtha Design’s iPad art application for kids-and there’s not much, really-it’s that Drawing Pad ($2) doesn’t automatically save the last piece of art created with its tools, starting every fresh reload with a blood red marker unless you manually saved and then reload the prior drawing. Edutainment: Drawing Pad + Poke Me!/Poke Me! HD