Review: Flipnote Studio

Now that millions have gotten their mitts on the Nintendo DSi, Nintendo needed to deliver something that made this upgrade an actual upgrade. This promise of DSiWare being relevant has been for the most part unsuccessful with needless two dollar clock and calendar apps followed by incomplete portions of retail games like Brain Age. Now Nintendo has released a completely new app called Flipnote Studio: one of the coolest and feature-rich software that the Big N ever released. Plus it’s free, two dollars less than what Nintendo charges for clocks that the DSi already has.

Flipnote Studio (dubbed Moving Memo in Japan) is an animation app that uses most, if not all the DSi’s features. Drawing each frame is easy with the stylus, and adding a new frame is as simple as pressing right on the D-pad. Animators are blessed with options like copying frames for fluid animations, seeing the last frame with the lightbox, speed control of the animation and creating a negative of the frame. Pressing up brings up a menu for copy/pasting, changing colors/brush/eraser, general options and other little knickknacks.Sadly, these artists are limited in one big way and that is the four-color pallet: White (canvas), black, red and blue. Worst than that, users can only choose between two of the non-canvas colors to use, although the few brushes that are available can help users make an illusion of pink, light blue and gray.

In addition to scribbles, animations can be enriched with saved pictures made with the DSi’s camera as well as sounds using the built-in microphone. The DSi never had a great camera, but Flipnote Studio further deteriorates the quality of the photos by robbing them of their color but two. After the user thinks they finished their “Flipnote”, they use the microphone to add background music and up to three sound effects. It’s a great feature to have indeed, but the imported audio isn’t the greatest quality and can leave a bit of feedback. Even with the limitations, these features will further user individuality to a great degree.

After completing the animated masterpiece, one can save them and upload them online. The best part is that when the piece is uploaded, it is not limited to just fellow DSi owners. Nintendo teamed up with a Japanese blog site named Hatena to allow every Flipnote to be uploaded as a flash animation onto their website. The best part is that these Flipnotes can be embedded like other flash videos, so users can show off their work on social networking sites like Facebook or to show off on a personal blog like Never Unplaying.

Everyone can search videos on Hatena’s site and the Nintendo DSi itself. This could have been so much more user friendly, but without the ability to name or describe a Flipnote disallows the ability to manually search. Instead, you can just look at all the Flipnotes ever uploaded and view them based on what the middle frame looks like. In a Google and YouTube infested society, this is far below a mediocre attempt. However, DSi owners can comment these videos in the most unique of ways by using the touch screen to write or draw out an opinion.

Flipnote Studio is proof that the Nintendo DSi is a true upgrade from its Lite predecessors. Its free price tag hooked people to try it and its ease of use with the addition to embed will keep them entertained for months on end. Nintendo once again shows how software should be done on their platforms. Hopefully this could be a stepping stone for a whole new retail franchise or a way for Nintendo to start experiencing download content or software upgrades. If they can upgrade Flipnote Studio or create a sequel that takes out all their limits by adding like a color-rich pallet and newer options like free-form select, this can be a new phenomenon worthy of a DSi purchase alone. For now, what we have is a great first step in a whole new way of experiencing a video game platform.

Never Unplaying's score of Flipnote Studio: 8.8/10.0