Drawn to Life is another 2D adventure game for the Nintendo DS. The big difference between it and other games in the over-crowded genre is the ability to literally create your own hero and the objects he interacts with, using a basic drawing and painting interface not unlike that found in Animal Crossing's pattern maker.

While the game will take you through a pre-determined design of levels, what they are filled with is ultimately up to you. The first thing you'll need to do is create your character either from scratch or by selecting one of the game's pre-made templates. The templates can be mixed and matched, so if you want the head of a monkey, the arms of an octopus and the legs of a ballerina, you can do that if your artistic skills are up to snuff. The editor can zoom in to enable pixel-perfect painting, meaning it could be possible to eyeball already-existing 2D sprites and draw them into the game. You say you want Drawn to Life to be a new Mario game? If you can fit Mario's round figure into the editor's tall, boxy borders, go for it. There's no limit to who you could cast for the game's starring role, provided you can create the pixelated version of someone. Your character is automatically animated as it roams through a level, though the animation is basic and the same no matter what it is you drew.

The game will also stop you at times and ask you to doodle a random object. In the demo of the game we saw at E3, a prompt appeared to draw a storm cloud. After that was finished, the person demonstrating the game came across a set of moving platforms to jump across. Each of them were the storm cloud object prompted for earlier. THQ said there will be a lot of things the game asks you to draw, but you won't know exactly what the object in question will be used for until you encounter it. This may create a mad-libs kind of situation where you draw something totally inappropriate or out of place given the prompt, only to see that your creation has become a weapon for your character, a boss character, or an important item you need to collect. If that's the case, you have the ability to change the look of any object at any time, including the look of your character, by going back to the editor function in the pause menu. Players can share creations with each other via multi-card multiplayer modes.

Drawn to Life will be out for the DS later this year.