Tattoo Mania

It's the pain. It's always the pain. While friends and relatives alike have assured me that the prick of a tattoo needle doesn't really hurt, I can't get the image of me screaming my little lungs out in my local tattoo parlour out of my head.

How relieved would I be if I found out that rather than poking a needle in me, a top class tattoo could be applied with the gentle stroke of a finger. A little too personal for a first meeting, perhaps - I prefer to be taken to dinner before I let anyone give my arm a tender stroke - but no doubt preferable.

Tattoo Mania sports just the sort of soft touch. Here you run a successful tattoo parlour while its owner is off on his jollies, taking your finger to the flesh of countless consumers without pause for breath.

The actual application of the tattoos is rather simple. Presented with an outline of the customer's preferred design, you simply stroke your finger over the required area - the longer the press, the darker the ink. With a queue of customers forming as you perform, the idea is to gently and deftly fill in the design before those waiting get impatient and leave.

Also of concern is the customer's pain threshold. Going outside the designated lines turns their skin a rather nasty red and pushes them to the limit. You can judge just how comfortable they are via a gauge in the top left of the screen that oscillates in line with your actions.

Too many smudges or heavy inking causes the customer to stand up and leave half-inked, ending the game in the process.

Just as important are those in the queue. Tattoo Mania allows you to switch them around should you spot someone getting frustrated with the wait.

They too come with their own gauge of sorts, a colour coded system that switches from green to yellow when they start to get a little jumpy to red when they're ready to throw in the towel. Just what you do when two or three are throbbing red is the bigger question, however.

That's the game's challenge: the designs and the actual setting are both meaningless. This is haste versus patience, urgency against quality. Balancing the art of pulling off a successful tattoo with the demands of those waiting is the key to success, but Tattoo Mania is a bit of a one trick pony.

Should you have the knack to see customer after customer, quick and painless service rewarding you with more and more dollars, this is the kind of title that can fill whole chunks of the afternoon. If it's evident from the word go, however, that your fingers are just a bit too fudged to make your name at the parlour, this is a game that will give you short shrift.

Just like the real thing, then, HandyGames's ode to the art of tattoos isn't for everyone, but for those who are tickled pink by ink Tattoo Mania is a painless and pleasant way to indulge this most fleshy of fine arts.