It’s in-depth. It has a lot of options. It’s versatile. But is it useful?
The DS’s touch screen has proven to be vital in terms of user input and control. It is no surprise that developers have experimented with this technology beyond games, creating useful applications such as notepads and calculators that are impressive in terms of control and presentation. Tomy has decided not only to enter the DS application ring but go beyond what everyone else has done on the DS with My Do It All, a title that sports over 16 applications that are both fun and practical.
When you first start My Do It All you go through a surprisingly lengthy friend card setup in which you create your on-screen icon and input your personal data. Once you are done you are taken to the game’s “desktop” where you select from any of the 16 available applications. The applications have been organized into three different categories: Productivity, Fun and Game.
Productivity applications let players find a specific fact. In this category you will find the world map, the calculator, the periodic table of elements, and your friend card. Fun applications have no goal. Instead, the player can experiment and play around with fun and quirky applications and explore their creativity. This is where the player will find the sound effects application, the rhythm machine, and the voice changer. Finally, game applications are where the players will partake in classic card and dice games such as Crazy Eights and Ninety-Eights. Other apps available in this section are the poll and spinner applications, which let the player decide the conclusion of an argument through voting and chance, respectively.
What’s really surprising about My Do It All is that each section goes beyond its duty and allows players to customize their experience however they see fit. The calculator app, for example, allows you to see the exchange rate of a country and make the appropriate calculations based on that, and the rhythm machine lets you save up to five different beats. The world map lets the player explore the maps of each country and learn about their population, its capital, and many other pieces of information.
The game applications are also robust in customization options. Many of them allow for download play if the second player doesn’t have the game. Players can also take turns passing one DS around if some players lack their own system.
Now whether all of these applications and features are useful is up to the consumer to decide. The only thing that diminishes the impact of this title is that many similar applications exist and are easily accessible elsewhere. Computers, cell-phones, MP3 players, and even websites provide these features and more, sometimes even for free, potentially leaving My Do It All to be nothing more than a novelty that might get ignored.
But focusing on its merits, My Do It All is quite robust. It does more than give the player an app to play. It lets you customize it in many ways that might be useful in the long run. It’s definitely a great experiment in how application software can also be productive in our daily activities.
