How many of you remember playing this once-popular piece of shit excuse for Pictionary? It was a top 25 app on iTunes… for about thirty seconds, until everyone realized their cumbersome sausage fingers were no better at drawing on a mobile phone than a 5-year-old boy was at pissing his name in the snow.
It's no revelation that this game sucks ass. When I first picked it up, I couldn't help but wonder why they stripped the element of competition from a multi-player game. But it's obvious now: Draw Something is a game in which you compete against your inability to make imagery in your head materialize on a touch screen, and try to help friends feel better about their incompetence by feigning recognition when they send you a steaming heap of digital excrement. Here are a few prime examples from my run-in with the game:
What the fuck? A blue saucer with a square piece of piss? What the hell is that blue thing floating around on the right-hand side of the screen?
I can't even remember what the fuck I was trying to draw when I made this. I think it may have been a sailboat, but who knows at this point. It could just as easily be a yellow genie exiting a blue lamp or a whale pissing out of its blow hole for all I know. Hell, the color might not have anything to do with what I was trying to depict at all, since you're only allowed to select from a shitty palette about as diverse as the population at a Republican convention. Want to draw purple rain? Tough shit. It'll have to be blue. How about an orange? Fuck you! Who the fuck do you think you are, expecting to draw an orange with the color orange?
I'm still confused by this next image. Is it a drunk cursor? A blue snake wearing a red thong?
Apparently it's supposed to be a funnel. Good work, Picasso. You'll be featured in art galleries around the world in no time.
It's Not All Bad
The one redeeming factor in Draw Something is that you can try your hand at celebrity Draw Something. The first famous character I got to draw was from Peanuts. I was so excited when I finally got to draw Snoopy. I had the Peanuts theme song running through my head. “I'm going to draw Woodstock doing a flip with the lines and shit, or maybe Snoopy on top of his dog house pretending he's the Red Baron,” I thought.
Nope, this shit:
That's why I hate this game. It destroys your ego one shitty picture at a time. You think you're going to totally rock the socks off your partner, then… a clump of black shit on a red mushroom.
After a while, I noticed that Draw Something recorded your entire attempt to draw for your partner, so I started drawing the object from one perspective, erasing it, and drawing from another. It didn't help:
It's some kind of animal… I think?
Now I'm not so sure. A tattered limb? An arm blown off during a shrapnel storm?
Yep, now I see it. It's a fucking horse.
And that's how I'm left communicating my art to fellow players, because everything I try to draw ends up looking like someone took a dump on a drawing tablet.