A masterpiece of marketing. I remember wanting this really bad, and asking/getting it for Christmas (along with Contra III) and I have no idea why. It’s a pain to actually use, being on a tv and using the mouse. You can’t save the files to your computer. We already had a Mac with MacPaint. A console is just not the right platform for a photoshop style game with a mouse.

Don’t forget, in inflation adjusted terms and given household incomes, games were expensive. Ones with extra peripherals doubly so!

It had a cool mouse game where you swatted stuff, which was nice.

It also had a music program, but I couldn’t compose for the life of me. And no internet with streaming to learn from others or share your creations, just magazines. (I still remember one preprogrammed Mario tune.)

I also remember being weirded out by making a pattern of checkerboard red and green, with units the size of a pixel. That made this trippy brown color when zoomed out that had weird effects at boundaries with other lines. (May be related to the CRT TVs everyone used for SNES at the time.)