Scribblenauts
Nintendo DS
Warner Bros.
8/10
“So many nouns, so little time”
In Scribblenauts, you play a boy armed with a notebook that can make any object written in it magically appear, and spend your time running around solving puzzles in a colorful world of imagination, limitless exploration, and strategic destruction.
If you ever wanted to stage fantasy death matches Scribblenauts is a dream come true. Will they help you find an elusive Starite? Who cares, that werewolf just made Beggin’ Strips out of the Egyptian sun god! Junior cockfighting at its finest. Things don’t always work as expected though. Handing a jackhammer to a construction worker, for instance, and getting absolutely no reaction from him can be a bit of a letdown. It felt a bit like they were trying to stuff the dictionary with as many obscure words and internet memes as possible rather than thinking about how the ones likely to come up to be used for solving the puzzles they designed would work in the actual challenges they set out.
For example, they had dozens of names of bizarre minerals and bird species but didn’t bother to include “Thermite.” For those of you unfamiliar with this handy substance all you need to know is it can be used to melt through solid steel, that there are a bunch of videos of it in action on YouTube, and it would have been an exceptionally handy tool in solving a variety of predicaments. I still was pleasantly surprised and impressed by how many things they did think of and how open ended and rewarding solving puzzles and trying different things really was. In addition to the over 200 stages you can play through, a level creator is also offered, making the possibilities for exploring and replay value of the game sky-rocket.
Only thing that I had serious issues with were the controls. They were almost unbearably confusing, inaccurate, and at times maddening. Struggling with getting things to do what they were supposed to was a major distraction from the whimsical fun I would have otherwise been having. More than once I wanted to stab myself in the eye with my choice of one of over 24 different weapons and throw the game across the room, only to have it stick to my hand before falling grossly short of my intended goal and get eaten by a werewolf.
If you can get over pouting about some minor details and not getting to melt through steel like a safe-cracker, and man up enough to suffer through the controls Scribblenauts is a damn fun game.
–Laura Gaddy