Hands On Beat Sketchers, The Game Sony Bundled With PlayStation Move In Japan

Instead of selling PlayStation Move with Sports Champions, Japan is getting Beat Sketchers (previously known as Sing & Draw) with their PlayStation Move starter kit.

Beat Sketchers is an augmented reality game that turns the PlayStation Move controller into a paintbrush and lets players draw on whatever the camera captures. You can draw mustaches on your friends or a dinosaur eating people at a PlayStation party. Guess which one I made.

A beat plays while you paint, draw, or doodle. You can change the beat to sounds from a turntable or a xylophone from the game’s menu. Players can also pick different kinds of brushes and colors by pointing and clicking with the PlayStation Move. Beat Sketchers also has a stamp tool, which lets TV artists copy an object literally next to them like a soda can or someone’s face and paste it on the screen.

So far, all of the screenshots of Beat Sketchers are against a white background. There’s a reason for this. In game, especially when played in a dimly lit room, Beat Sketchers looks fuzzy. The problem appears to be the PlayStation Eye, which has a maximum resolution of 640 x 480.

While Beat Sketchers is a retail game in Japan, Sony Computer Entertainment America plans to release this as a downloadable PlayStation Network title in North America.