Its simplicity is the reason why Flipnote Studio is so amazing, because it takes very little effort to pull off animations you can be proud of. But for the most part you'll be able to pull off some seriously amazing stuff if you work within the program's limitations. Even with the enhanced abilities, you still can't select an entire snippet of animation frames and copy them into a different part of your animation. In the basic mode, you can't crop out tiny objects and slide them around the frame, but if you enable the "advanced options" you get full select, copy and paste.
Sure, there will be a few times when you'll say to yourself, "I wish I could…." That's what the "advanced options" are for. The program has been made to be as simple to use as possible, so you won't be overwhelmed with options beyond simple animation abilities. For someone like me, it means a cartoon like this: That 15 second animation took about an hour of work from start to finish, and incorporates nearly every aspect of Flipnote Studio's features. This is an extremely simple, yet fully featured animation program that enables anyone with any sense of stylus skills to produce animations of significant quality quickly. Flipnote Studio is the index card stack for today's generation. Usually these stories ended up with Nameless Stick Man blowing up or breaking his spine.
My artistic talent barely crosses the "stick figure" skills, but I had fun putting together some barely cohesive narratives. Like many of you, when I was younger I spent my downtime stapling together index cards and stealing stacks of Post-it Notes so I could produce stupid flipbook animations. The fact that it's a free download makes it all that much sweeter. The potential is there, but for the past three months Nintendo hasn't really made huge strides to entice DS Lite owners to upgrade to the next generation – the DSiWare line-up is all over the place in quality and the ones that are considered "good" don't really do a good job pitching the system to someone content with the already great (and cheaper) DS Lite system.įlipnote Studio, just released in the US, is the first piece of software for the Nintendo DSi that makes me comfortable in saying that you now should upgrade to the new system. But it's been extremely difficult to convince existing DS Lite owners to make the jump. I'm in the camp that believes that – even with the lack of GBA slot - the DSi is a superior handheld system to the DS Lite.