Text like it’s 2004 with PictoChat for iMessage

Pictochat comes to iMessage

Relive the early 2000s and chat using a new Nintendo DS Pictochat-inspired iMessage app.

At some point in the last month, a new iMessage app has popped up, promising to recreate the feeling of “sitting on the bus and messaging your friends via your favorite two-screened handheld.” The app, aptly called Picochat for iMessage, does just that.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I installed Picochat for iMessage. I mean, yes, I was a fervent user of Picochat in the early aughts, but I still was curious how well it would work on an iPhone.

The verdict? It took me straight back to the days of sitting in a crowded food court with my cousin, each of us hunched over our Nintendo DS Lites, stylus in hand, scrawling out deranged little in-jokes punctuated with a flurry of seemingly unrelated emojis.

It works pretty much exactly how I remember Pictochat working when I got my first Nintendo DS Lite. Everything seems to be there, from the cramped little keyboard to the adorable little square emojis.

There are even some new additions, including new emojis and the ability to save favorite messages for sending later.

The Pictochat keyboard leaves a lot to be desired on a screen this small

Sure, it’s not a particularly intuitive way to send messages on the iPhone. The box you write in is incredibly small, and the on-screen keyboard is nigh impossible to use on an iPhone. This is doubly true if you’re still holding on to an iPhone mini.

Putting your phone in horizontal mode doesn’t expand or enlarge the keyboard, either — it simply pops up a side menu of favorite drawings. If the developer continues to work on the app in the future, I’d suggest making the message box larger in horizontal mode, the same way Apple allows Handwritten messages when you turn your iPhone on its side.

But that didn’t stop me from pestering several of my fellow millennials and an AppleInsider staffer with little Pictochat messages this morning, either. And, because each PicoChat is uploaded as an image, you can bother your friends even if they don’t have the app installed.

I’d like to point out that it works quite well on the iPad when you use the Apple Pencil. If you’ve got an iPad and you’re craving a frisson of 2000’s nostalgia, this will get you that fix.

No matter which device you use, it’s not the easiest way to send messages, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend using it for anything important. However, it’s a fun, free app that is totally worth the download, if not just to relive days gone by.

This is also where I point out that this is a third-party app that is in no way developed or maintained by Nintendo. Nintendo tends to be a pretty litigious company, to put it lightly, so there’s a fair chance that it’ll try to have the app removed if it thinks they have the grounds to do so.

But, until that happens, I’ll probably still use it to bother my cousin just as much as I did in 2006. As I’ve already said, it’s hella nostalgic.

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