Scribblenauts is a completely original gaming experience that anyone can play, which offers fun for all ages, with two styles of play and over 200 levels. In Scribblenauts, players use the touch screen of the Nintendo DS to help develop your character Maxwell Starita at all levels to solve a series of puzzles, armed with his pen, notebook and fantasy. The players write the word for everything that comes to mind to achieve the goal. Each object behaves as you would in the real world, and players can combine to create an infinite variety of objects entirely new scenarios. Each level has more of a statement opposing the use as a solution, opening the game infinite replay. As players progress through Scribblenauts ten worlds, each with 1111 levels of puzzle action for a total of 220 challenges to complete. Each level has an equal, the number of points for finishing the level. Win a pair of socks, Wins "Ollars" the currency of the game, players can use to buy new levels and music .
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not necessarily the best but certainly the most original DS game on the market today
I've had about two weeks to thoroughly delve into Scribblenauts now, and I can honestly say it is the most original game for the Nintendo DS I have ever played, and possibly one of the best console games in the last five years. The reason for that is because it is a radical departure from every single game ever made, in that it doesn't challenge your dexterity or button-pushing skill like FPS and action games, and doesn't rely at all on random number generators or luck, like a lot of strategy games; but instead, challenges your imagination and creativity. This is a great game for any age that enjoys puzzle games, and if I had to recommend just one game for a new DS owner to show off the abilities of their console, this would be it. Having fully "completed" the levels long ago, I am still enjoying it just as much as when I first got it.
GAMEPLAY
The premise to this puzzle game is to complete puzzles to collect a "starite." You do this by using the stylus to write nouns to help you complete your objective. A simple example would be a level where the starite is separate from you by a moat. You could write "bridge" and a bridge would appear. Place it over the moat, walk over to the starite, and you've just completed the level. While that sounds very simplistic and like a boring example, that is because the solution you chose is simplistic and boring, and you will be scored accordingly. The game's tagline: "Write Anything, Solve Everything," refers to the ability to almost literally write ANYTHING. One of the first things that will amaze you upon starting this game, is how virtually unlimited the Scribblenauts dictionary is. The dictionary contains an amazing 22,802 words. While some of these are duplicates that spawn the same item (such as "computer" and "Internet"), that means that the Scribblenauts team created animations and graphics for almost 22,802 objects. With the exception of a lot of proper nouns, copyrighted objects, and graphic/adult nouns, almost ANY object you can think of can be summoned. I played for 2 days before finding a noun it didn't recognize. Need a plate of spaghetti to complete a puzzle? It's in there. What about a stapler, carpet, a zebra, a tightrope, and a button? All in there. I was amazed when I decided to try the word "harness" and it came up, since it's such a generic and specific object. Who would even think to include that? The Scribblenauts team is who. You will find yourself becoming giddy at discovering some of the objects available to you. One of the more well known is that you can summon the Necronomicon (a fictional book appearing in horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft). Not sure what to do with it? Summon a necromancer and watch him interact with the Necronomicon and start chanting. This can be particularly useful if you summoned a zombie earlier, and need to get rid of it because it is running around and turning everyone else on the screen into zombies! During one puzzle, I used a shark to get rid of a smaller fish. I the needed to get rid of the shark, but I couldn't think of anything in the ocean tougher than a shark. Out of chance, I typed in "megalodon," and was amazed when a huge prehistoric megalodon shark dropped into the water and promptly devoured it! A well-known example of creativity is a player who was on a level with zombie robots that he had to dispatch. Traditional methods were ineffective, so the player summoned a time machine, traveled back to pre-historic times and found a dinosaur, rode the dinosaur back through the time machine, and then stomped all over the zombies. I won't give away anymore examples, because I really believe your experience will be much better if you discover these objects on your own; and I strongly encourage people to avoid reading too many reviews of Scribblenauts until they've played a lot of the game, so they don't run into any more spoilers.
There are two modes to gameplay. Puzzle Mode requires you to complete some type of puzzle to make the starite appear. An example is to collect flowers for a botanist. But one of the flowers is on a cliff, one is underwater (which contains a piranha), and one is right beside an angry bee. You must now come up with object(s) to help you accomplish this. Each puzzle has an average number of objects it expects you to use to complete it. The fewer objects you use, the more points you get. Maybe there's an object you can use to take care of the bee and the piranha together. Creative thinking like that will earn you Style Points. Additionally, the less time it takes you to complete the puzzle, earns you points as well. Once completed, your points are added up and converted to "ollars," which can be used to purchase new levels, songs, and avatars. You can complete each level as many times as you want, but completing it three times with completely different items will earn you "prodigy" status and a gold star. The first time going through a level, I highly suggest completing it as quickly as possible, since this seems to give you the most points. Next, go for style, which is where you can have the most fun. The game takes everything into consideration. It knows you can summon a gun every single time to get rid of a troublesome animal that is blocking your path, but if you come up with a more creative method, such as using an item to dig a ditch, putting some kind of bait on the other side, and trapping the animal, will not only earn you style points, but points for "no weapons" as well.
There are ten "worlds." Each has two modes of play (that are completely different and don't recycle screens), and elevel levels per mode. That's 220 different levels. If you play through by trying to complete each level 3-4 different ways, that's 880 levels! They get progressively harder and require much more skill. Although I completed all of them in two weeks, that was rushed for review purposes and had I taken my time, it would have taken me much much longer. This is not a traditional DS game that has a shelf life of 30 hours. There are many more options to play this game that I will discuss below. The game's title screen is also built as a "sandbox" environment, where you can play around and spawn objects to see how they interact.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The AI of the game is really impressive. Every one of the objects you can spawn has properties associated with it for interacting with its environment and with other objects. Beavers and termites eat wood. Consequently, if you spawn these animals near wood, they will proceed to consuming it. The same association exists with a lumberjack (provided you give him a tool to work with). Predatory animals also interact with each other. A piranha will eat a minnow. A shark will eat a piranha. A megalodon will eat a shark. And yes, there are creatures in the game that will even take on a megalodon. It is amazing to me how the developers were able to come up with all of these associations for so many different objects. Your character can interact with them as well, and even create new items. I found that interacting with a honeycomb yielded a jar of honey, but interacting with a bomb was not as sweet. The artificial intelligence provides for endless possibilities with the level editor.
WIRELESS + LEVEL EDITOR
Scribblenauts has wireless features built in so you can play levels with friends. Simply exchange friend codes with people and you can share custom-designed levels. While the level editor has been overlooked in many reviews, I think this is one of the biggest features of the game. Using the custom world environments provided by the game and the numerous objects, you can spend the rest of your life coming up with completely individual and unique levels to exchange. The great part of this is you can customize the AI of the objects, and their relationships with other objects. For instance, the natural AI for a dog is to attack a cat, but you can change this so the dog is scared of the cat, or even protective of the cat. It's great to send a friend a level with a box of mice in his way, and have him remove the box and suddenly be attacked by the mice. Or have a dragon that is deathly afraid of grilled cheese sandwiches. Create a level with dozens of pirates on one side and dozens of ninjas on the other, separated by a brick wall. Remove the wall and sit back and watch as they battle to the death. As I said, the combinations and possibilities are virtually endless. You can't completely modify the physical landscapes and are forced to use the templates from the game, but you can summon thousands of landscape items (trees, mountains, sun, city hall, etc) to get around this and make your level as unique as possible.
COMPLAINTS
It would be nice if the wireless capabilities allowed for downloadable new content and levels, without having to exchange friend codes. Given the customization of the level editor, I find this to be a huge drawback. If someone creates an awesome level online, there is no easy way to distribute it to thousands of people. I also would have liked it if the game was a little more restrictive on what kind of items you could create during the puzzle phase. Maybe if it had a skill level associated with it. You could feasibly breeze through the first few worlds just pulling out a gun and a pair of wings to take care of 70% of the problems. Of course you won't have much fun doing this, but it would be neat if there was a "hard" level where you couldn't use the same object more than once in any level for an entire world. Another complaint, is that it's too easy to get rid of items you create. Anything you create can also be destroyed. While this is very useful (you can't summon infinite items, and the screen gets cluttered with more than a dozen or so), it would be more challenging to have to not be able to dismiss certain items, which would cause you to think more carefully about what you summon. If I summon a shark to get rid of a piranha, I can always then just drag the shark to the trash can when I'm done. But if that wasn't possible and I was forced to deal with the shark as well, it would make me think more carefully. Scribblenauts also features a very good (better than Brain Age) handwriting recognition program so you can just write in words, but this is fairly useless, as it is much faster to just tap on the letters in the QWERTY keyboard it displays.
Again, I strongly encourage new players not to read too many reviews, lest you have a lot of the puzzles spoiled for you. And definitely DO NOT read the list of available nouns that is floating around out there. I imagine there will be thousands of Scribblenauts videos appearing on the Internet in the months to come, and I suggest you stay away from those and all message boards until you're well into the game if you want to have the best Scribblenauts experience you can. Overall, Scribblenauts is simply the most original and best-designed game for the Nintendo DS out today. It is great for all ages (I am 35) and I think it is especially good for younger students as it brings the best of education and puzzle games together. It not only encourages an increased vocabulary and better spelling, but more importantly, develops and fosters critical and creative thinking. The player is not just running around a level collecting coins, but actively using the creative centers of their brain to come up with the most unique and efficient way to solve a puzzle. This would be a terrific tool for bringing into early childhood education classrooms. If you own a DS and have not purchased this game yet, you NEED it in your collection. If you don't own a DS, I would even say that the enjoyment of Scribblenauts is possibly justification alone to purchase one.
EDIT 10.25.09 - After spending several months on this game, I do agree with the reviewer who mentioned that a major fault with the game is that a huge amount of the items available do not "do anything" and do not interact with other items like they should. It's great that there are 22,000 items, but if 10,000 of them can't be used for practical gameplay, then what is the point? As such, I am changing my star rating from 5 to 4 stars. I still recommend the game to people, but there is a lot of lost potential here.
Overly ambitious project falls somewhat short
Here I am to spoil the party with the very first "meh" review! I was really excited for Scribblenauts; in fact my husband and I even purchased a DS explicitly to play this game. In point of fact I don't dislike this game, it simply doesn't really deliver as promised. And really, how COULD a game deliver when it purports to allow you to write ANYTHING and have those items interact? It's really an insurmountable task. I don't begrudge the developers for an innovative, exciting, groundbreaking effort. I actually feel this game is a must-play for the sheer genius of its goals. Ultimately however I feel that this game falls too short of its lofty ambitions and ends up disappointing.
I won't go over the premise here, or even highlight the good elements, because those are readily available (and, accurately stated) in the glowing reviews. I won't even say the game is bad, because it's absolutely not. It's a solid puzzle game and it does, in fact, seem to offer multiple solutions to its myriad of "adventure game" situations and platform-ey puzzles.
The developers could have taken one of two directions with this game - depth, or breadth. To make a game with high depth of item interactivity but a smaller inventory , or to make a game with a massive breadth of content but limited or nonexistent item interactivity. The devs chose the latter, and I feel that this was the wrong decision.
I find myself frequently frustrated by the lack of item interactivity. I don't quite understand why an item is in the game, and yet cannot be usefully leveraged in a logical way. People want to devise elaborate schemes to solve the puzzles, but sometimes a logical, straightforward approach is ok. Unfortunately, a lot of the logical, straightforward approaches are not possible. Some examples...
I have a baby on screen. I summon in a pacifier and a diaper. The baby isn't attracted to either item. I can't put the diaper on the baby. I can't give the baby the pacifier. I summon in a toddler and give the toddler the pacifier, but the toddler just holds it. The toddler doesn't DO anything with the pacifier. I can't put the diaper on the toddler. Maxwell won't even hold the diaper. Why do the pacifier and diaper exist, if I cannot DO anything with them?
There is a Rottweiler that I need to subdue, because when I go near him, he bites me. I could blow it up with a rocket launcher, or put a dog walker next to it, or open a black hole by it. Those would be funny solutions. But I just want to use a practical solution, so I summon a muzzle to put on the rottweiler. I can't put the muzzle on the rottweiler. Maxwell can't even hold the muzzle. No NPC can hold the muzzle. The muzzle cannot do anything whatsoever, as far as I can tell, except sit on the ground.
I put in an oven and a baker, and drop in some dough. For a moment I am excited because the baker runs for the dough and picks it up, but then he just eats it. I try a few more times, but he never puts it in the oven. I get rid of the baker and put in a policeman instead, and it turns out he does exactly the same thing - picks up the dough and eats it. There is no special relationship between "baker" and "dough" as far as I can tell - the dough is simply part of the "food" category and a human NPC will pick it up and eat it.
So my question to you is - why is there dough, a diaper, a pacifier? I would give up all of those things for depth of item interaction elsewhere - for example, a muzzle that I can actually put on an animal as a way of subduing it.
In the end all of the items in the game are reduced to their bare bones of functionality. There is a "food chain" of sorts that defines the way any living creature interacts with another living creature. A policeman will chase a robber, a dog will chase a cat, a dingo will even eat a baby. Many of the human creatures do have items that will cause them to interact reliably with the environment - for example the woodcutter, if given an axe, will chop down a tree. But this isn't always the case... in a situation where a boy needs help to break a piñata, why doesn't he just break it when I give him a stick? It ends up being the objects that disappoint the most, because they rarely are utilized well by the NPCs, and cannot be combined with each other by Maxwell. If I can summon poison and meat, why can't I poison the meat before I toss it to the piranha?
I personally feel that this game would have benefited from a highly increased level of item interaction, at the expense of a vastly reduced vocabulary. I would have been very pleased with "only" 1000 writable objects that interacted with each other in a meaningful and complex way. If there is a muzzle in the game, I want to be able to put that muzzle on a dog to subdue it. Otherwise there was no reason for the muzzle to be there other than to showcase the fact that the developer put "everything" in this game, which they practically succeeded at. But when a very large portion of that everything does nothing, you may find yourself relying on the "same old items" to complete every puzzle. You can do just about anything with a jetpack and a black hole, but where's the fun in that? I understand that a game with 22,802 words must sacrifice depth to accommodate the breadth, and this is where I feel the misstep was made. Give me a lot less items that are more meaningful, instead of everything including the kitchen sink.
In conclusion - a very ambitious and even enjoyable game that will not allow you to be quite as creative as you hoped for. This game is a success as a puzzle game, but a disappointment when compared to its massive hype.
Biggest disappointment of the year
Boy was I looking forward to this game. It's been on my radar since E3, I followed every scrap of news and announcement made about the game, and it was a no-brainer day 1 purchase for me. Now that I've spent some time with it, I'm sad to say this game is a crushing disappointment. I've never seen so much wasted potential, and more importantly, such terrible implementation.
Since I have almost nothing good to say about this game, I will mention the one bright spot first. The music in this game is really good. Different people have different tastes, so your mileage may vary, but I found the music to be funky, upbeat, and generally charming. Everything else though.... yeesh!
The game has a lot of problems, but the biggest has got to be the controls. Utterly unacceptable. The number of cheap deaths your avatar will suffer due to the mind-bogglingly poor controls defies belief. The sheer number of times this fool throws himself into a bottomless pit, a river of lava, or a pool full of sharks is staggering. The programmers decided to assign movement to the touchscreen, while the D-pad moves the camera around. The buttons do nothing. Many times, you will tap an area to move to, and your avatar will sprint there at full speed, and then inertia will carry him to his doom. Forget fine movements, if you tap too close to the avatar, he won't move at all. So, just walking around presents a major challenge. Heaven help you when it comes time to interact with the objects you create, especially the smaller or thinner ones; eggs or pool cues or pencils for example. I've never had any accuracy problems on any of my other DS games, but in this one, you can blatantly tap an object, with no doubt that you've hit it, and the game doesn't realize it anyway. Try to pick up a blob of glue... and watch as your character dives headfirst into a pit of lava instead. Brilliant. Most frustrating of all are the (thankfully few) puzzles that only give you a few seconds to write in one or more objects, and then place them in fairly specific places. The controls just aren't good enough to hack it in these levels, and even if you know what you have to do to solve the puzzle, it will still take several tries to get the controls to cooperate with you. The sad thing is, a lot of these issues could have been resolved simply by assigning movement to the D-pad, and camera controls to the touchscreen.
While the controls are so unacceptably bad I could probably write 3 pages just about them, let's move on. The physics of the game are pretty dodgy too. One early puzzle tasked me to grab a star on top of a cliff, out of normal reach. I'd already used "jetpack" several times at this point and decided it was time to mix things up a little. First I made a "boulder" and dropped that at the top of the cliff. Then I made a "rope" and attached that to the boulder, which.... promptly slid off the cliff, pulled down by the weight of the rope. Yes, apparently in the world of Scribblenauts, a 6ft length of rope weighs much more than a torso-sized boulder. That was actually my first nagging little warning in the back of my mind that the game was not going to be all I had hoped for. Other frustrations include trying to shuttle people around in planes, choppers, cars, boats, etc. It can be done, but will require a lot of dragging and dropping and re-dragging before the game finally figures out that your avatar should be in the driver's seat and the other character in the passenger seat.
The game's "giant" dictionary is a huge cheat. For example, "black hole", "everything", and "nothing" all produce the same results. "Sword" and "saber" both produce an identical straight-edge blade. "Cutlass", "kopesh", "katana" and "scimitar" all produce identical curve-edge blades, which function exactly as "sword". Honestly, I'd rather have just "sword" in the dictionary, if it means more room on the cartridge to improve the actual programming. Just as poor are the relationships between a lot of the words in the dictionary. One puzzle asked me to get past a bully to get a candy bar for a little girl. The bully beats you to death if you get near him (which seems to make him less of a bully and more of a sociopath, but whatever). I tried making a "cop" to keep the bully in line, which he did... by pulling out his gun and blowing the bully's head off. Puzzle failed, you can't hurt the bully. Why would a cop murder a bully in cold blood? Why won't a "driver" actually drive a vehicle? Oh, they'll sit in it until the cows come home, but don't expect them to move even an inch. Things just don't work the way they should.
So, I've had the game since launch, and every day I found myself playing it less and less. I haven't touched it in a week now, and I will be trading it in soon for something - anything - else. Bad AI, bad controls, an artificially inflated dictionary, bad controls, illogical relationships between items, and bad controls have led to one inescapable conclusion. I despise this game. And it really is a pity, considering how much I was looking forward to it. If you want to solve puzzles on your DS, do yourself a huge favor and stick to the much-better Professor Layton games.
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