It's incredible how simple circumstance can lead you down the darkest of paths.

I've mentioned in at least one review by now that my family was never the most well-to-do. Not to say that my brother and I ever wanted for much of anything; we were well taken care of and we did enjoy the rare treat from time to time. However, we weren't the kind of family that had a ton of disposable income to toss at every shiny new release. When I finally got my first Nintendo DS in 2005, there wasn't much money left for games. My choices were either to save up and get something top-shelf or take a chance on something from the clearance bin.

When you're young and desperate and a game offers itself to you for ten bucks, you don't second-guess yourself. You take the plunge.

Came home from the flea market with this in tow and slapped it in within minutes of climbing into bed. I spent a little time playing dress-up with the meagre default options before initiating my first dialogue with one of the myriad conversational partners on offer. The words have since left me, but if you've ever sat down to a meal with that relative you see once a year and only ever asks you about how work is going and if you're still dating that girl, you know exactly what they're like. All of them.

I don't know how to justify the existence of Ping Pals. I've heard that Wayforward pretty much just developed it as a means of securing a Nintendo DS devkit. I've also heard they came up with the concept before Nintendo first introduced Pictochat as a built-in feature of said handheld. Since playing Ping Pals, I've heard voices in my walls. I'm not really sure anything else I hear will make me feel better about it.

The thing about a game like Ping Pals is that you really need to know other people who own it for it to make any sense. Otherwise, all you're left with is tinned interactions with the previously mentioned NPCs who prompt you for simple yes/no answers on such thrilling topics as the weather and the kinds of pants you like to wear. Thus, assuming you already tick off the first two boxes (having friends in the first place and having friends who own a Nintendo DS), you are now confronted with the unenviable task of convincing others to purchase it.

"Hey, I've been playing this game called Ping Pals. You should get it so we can play it together!"

"Well, what's it about?"

"You join a chatroom and you can talk to your friends!"

"... Doesn't the DS already have a chatroom built in?"

"I mean yeah, but this one lets you have an avatar you can dress up... And you can play minigames, and talk to NPCs and stuff!"

"I dunno. How much does it cost?"

"$30!"

I would wager a door-to-door dryer sheet salesman would have more luck.

But I can entertain hypotheticals all day long - it doesn't do anything to change the fact that the only other person I knew who owned a DS was my brother, and we were very much in the same boat. Two copies of Ping Pals was out of the question. I played it alone. I got to know the cast pretty intimately. Grandma hates answering machines. Biff is a big fan of muscle cars. Never figured out why Snakey sparkles like that, though. When you got tired of playing High-Low or discount Family Feud, you could spend your hard-earned credits on cosmetics. There were a lot of them! Hundreds, even! I was the only person who ever saw them. I was the only person who ever would. I was trapped in my own personal hell, endlessly refreshing the store for new baubles with which to decorate my electronic puppet's stony countenance, whispering in binary to fictitious figments I wouldn't even want to befriend in real life. But they were all I had. For every ping, there must be a pal.

Eventually, Warioware Touched! would free me from my prison. Even though I willingly invited the demon into my home, it was Wayforward who loosed it into the streets. No number of scantily-clad genies or policewomen will ever make up for the pain I endured in my youth. Only by the grace of Virt do their offices yet stand. Maybe that Clock Tower remaster will be okay. We'll see. Honestly, I'm probably too lazy to make good on any threats.

At least the music was kind of catchy.

People wanted this game when it came out. I know it's hard to believe, considering the game's reputation, but there weren't really any "creative" games at the console's launch. Wouldn't it be cool to have a game with in depth customization? There's some sort of social element to the game, going off of previews and this was still in the time where the .//hack franchise could be taken "seriously", virtual worlds still held some sort of appeal. I wanted Ping Pals when the DS was coming out.

This might be the worst launch title for any console before the 2nd generation, which admittedly aren't games I'm really familiar with. Go through the list, try to find one that you'd have less fun with. Originally, I going to type out a list of games that were released across all consoles but I just didn't have much to add other than "yeah, this was worse." Even inept disasters made by devs unfamiliar with the hardware like Gundam Crossfire hold up favorably to Ping Pals.

There's a very limited selection of clothes that were pre-existing assets that the devs got from a Korean MMO developer. If you want to unlock more, you need to earn them through playing inane minigames like "guess a number" or "can you name a fruit that's the color orange?" You can't even unlock everything in the game with one cartridge! To have access to a full selection of uninspired assets that weren't good enough for Nexon's B team, you'll need multiple cartridges of Ping Pals.

The worst part of it all though, is that the in game conversations you have with the game itself, most of what your single player experience will be in Ping Pals, is worthless. The conversations consist of questions you'd ask a five year old like "do you like when it's hot or cold outside", followed up by a canned sentence or two about a character's specific preference to weather. There aren't "characters" in the sense that you get to know them or they have any actual motivation, they're transparent dialogue trees that don't even last very long.

I don't feel like this game, at any point, was able to justify its existence. The more I dug into this game, the more recycled and stale I felt, and I already had an awful impression of this game. There's children that got this game over Warioware Touched, Feel the Magic or SMB64 DS. Easily the worst game on the console, and if this game could muster any emotional reaction out of me, it's awe in just how hard this game dropped the ball on every level.

The font looks bad compared to Pictochat, it's not even an aesthetically pleasing upgrade. This could have all been worth it if it was a redundant program that looked better than what you could get for free. Then I'd have an excuse to keep it on a hacked DS or a flashcart or something and then use DS Download play (because nobody's going to have this ROM laying around) to jack off over stupid DS bullshit. I have the most optimal situation for Ping Pals and it probably couldn't even do that correctly.