Jess has found an interesting relationship between Harold and PictoChat:
Today in class we discussed the story Harold and the Purple Crayon. I couldn’t help but make a fairly obvious comparison to the PictoChat Battle Stage in Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the Wii. For those who have yet to play the game the PictoChat stage is based on the DS Lite’s chat interface in which up to 16 people can communicate not only through traditional typed text but also gives the option of chatting through drawn pictures and written words using a Stylis and the DS Lite touch screen in an MS Paint-esque format. The Stage for Super Smash Brothers is simply a blank page in which drawings randomly appear that the player can interact with in ways varying from simply standing on the drawings to one image in which a drawn person blows on characters within the game making them react accordingly. Regardless of the drawing’s actions the player is forced to adapt to whatever appears on the spot. Of course there is some repetition but for the most part the drawings are in a random enough fashion to make the stage challenging and interesting.