This review was kind of spur-of-the-moment, as a co-worker offered to let me borrow the title, so I’ve been playing it off and on over the past few days. I have Mario and Luigi 3 coming this week, so I may be able to squeeze through the game before next Sunday. For now, though, I figured you guys might like to see a review of this title. Do bear in mind that I didn’t complete the game in its entirety, so take this review with some more grains of salt than you otherwise might. As a side note, I’ve been playing Bowser’s Inside Story — I was glad to see that RMC was able to get his own review up a bit ago. We wanted to have two reviews of the game up, so I actually haven’t read RMC’s yet because I want to write my own first. That said, please leave some comments on how you’d like me to tackle the review: would you rather I write my own opinions independent of RMC’s review, allowing for more objective comparing/contrasting, or should I read his and point out what I agree/disagree with? If you have any feedback for dual reviews in that regard, add that to your comments on this review. Scribblenauts Review -The Sketch- Time Played: About 6-7 hours Completion: About 100 Missions Conditions: Played Challenge Mode levels, fiddled with level creation a little -Writing Anything- Scribblenauts offers, in concept, an experience unlike any other game out there: players can summon objects at will by typing in their name, allowing them to solve puzzles in open-ended freedom. A brilliant and original idea on paper, but when the scribblings are put into pixels, does the idea stand on its own? The short answer is that Scribblenauts achieves something worthwhile in its experience, but the technical aspects could have done with some more time on the drawing board. OK, yea, I’m getting as sick of the puns as you are, so let’s just move on. There’s not really a plot to speak of in Scribblenauts — players assume the role of Maxwell, that quirky-looking kid with the rooster hat and the headphones. Or whatever the heck is going on there. It’s kind of irrelevant, really, because as much as he may be the mascot of the game, he has no personality, and can be swapped out with a number of unlockable skins. But this game isn’t about a character, it’s about a concept, and that concept offers a lot of promise that is certainly worthy of playing around with. The premise here is that players are presented with puzzles of varying complexity, left to their own devices to figure them out. And this is quite literal, as players will need to create objects out of nothing but words. Type in a person, place, or thing, and chances are fairly likely it will appear before you in a puff of illogic, allowing you to manipulate and utilize it to your own will to accomplish your task and collect the shiny doodad to complete the level. What this means is that any two given players could easily tackle the same puzzle in completely different ways. A simple example: an object underwater needs to be collected and is guarded by a shark. You could use a fishing pole to try and pull it up to you. You could equip SCUBA gear and a spear and kill the shark guarding it. If you didn’t want to get your hands dirty you could summon a mythological beast to slaughter the carnivorous fish for you. And this is an extremely simple puzzle — as the game progresses, they get more and more complex and difficult, allowing for much more involved and widely different possibilities. Essentially, Scribblenauts relies on the creativity of the player to make the game. What this means is that if you aren’t particularly creative, then you’ll end up relying on the same things over and over again — something I admit to doing myself when I played for sessions longer than a few missions in a row. The game even forces you from time to time to do something with a special condition, like not hurting anything, or not damaging something. The game benefits from shorter play sessions, allowing your mind to kind of reset and have different ideas to use. More than once I would get so frustrated with some of the later puzzles that I’d literally stop playing, come back to it later, my brain refreshed, and end up solving it in a completely different means than I had originally thought of. The game also rewards you with some extra points for solving puzzles quickly and with the least number of objects, as well as fulfilling certain random objectives, like creating an item you never have before. So Scribblenauts does a good job at enabling one’s creativity to be the core catalyst in solving its puzzles, but what about the technicalities of it? This is a video game, after all. You can call upon thousands of objects, and while there are some really cool and unexpected things (such as LongCat of internet fame and other internet memes), don’t expect to be whipping out Indiana Jones or Godzilla or anything copyrighted. That said, who needs that stuff when you can summon fantasy beings like Cthulu and Zeus? Some of the fun of Scribblenauts is randomly getting an idea and seeing if the game actually allows you to create it and implement it, and I was pleased at how most anything I could think of I seemed able to create within the bounds the the game sets up initially (no drugs/alcohol, no copyrighted stuff, etc.). So as far as the possibilities are concerned, they’re most certainly there. The visual aesthetic is simple and sometimes kind of weird or cheesy looking, but it works just fine and falls in line with the game’s concept and tone. You can even switch to a mode where clicking on objects will tell you what they are, in case you want to summon something specific on your own later. The characters are expressionless but little bubbles appear around them to indicate whether they’re happy, sad, angry, or in the mood to kick the ass of anything that comes across them (especially helpful, since sometimes certain things will attack you and other times they won’t). It gets the job done, but there’s more often than not a weird lifeless feeling to the proceedings — any characters there, including yourself, are just objects in the puzzle to be manipulated. Not that we needed any kind of story or characterization, I just wish that at least human characters had some kind of facial expressions, which could easily have been copied across the board. With just two beady eyes they end up feeling like lifeless dolls to me. Now granted, this is a pretty minor complaint, it’s just something that ended up bothering me over time. It became more apparent how lifeless the characters are when they seem inept at co-operating with you in many occasions or doing retarded things. For example, if I wanted to try and get someone across a gap, I might create something that enables me to fly and pass them a rope so they can hold on. In certain puzzles like this, for reasons I couldn’t determine, a person would just refuse to take a rope — or any other object. I found it baffling and the game has no indication as to why certain characters will co-operate and others won’t. In some cases this forces you to be more creative and come up with something new, but in others, it’s just frustrating. As for the aforementioned retarded things, why do witches do everything into frogs, and then eat them immediately thereafter? Why do some people drink jars of tranquilizing solution when I place them in their hands just because they’re hungry? All of these issues are more minor and can be generally overlooked in spite of the game’s scope and accomplishments. That said, there is unfortunately a very glaring issue that really holds this game back from being something special, and that would have to be the controls. Everything is operated via the stylus. This makes sense when you’re manipulating objects, but not as much with your character. Your character will move toward wherever you hold down the stylus. Words can only do so much to express how extremely imprecise and frustrating this can be. In puzzles that require you to take care to not fall down a pit, move too close toward an enemy, or anything like that, I repeatedly met this end: creating an object and trying to tap on it, only to result in my accidentally moving my character. This became such an issue I reset my system, recalibrated my touchpad, and tried again, with no change. Some of the objects are simply too small to grab easily, resulting in your character accidentally moving around. An extremely easy fix to this would have been allowing the D-pad for character movement — yes, it moves the camera, but so do the face buttons. Why not just let the face buttons alone control the camera and the D-pad to move the character? The character controls are loose and slippery as it is, but just this simple change would allow for the controls to be much more convenient. Between trying to grab and move small objects and your character’s controls being incredibly awkward, the game can be seriously hindered at times, and there were definitely some puzzles I’d just skip out on because I got so sick of feeling like my ideas couldn’t be put into motion because of crappy controls. When a game has me turning it off in frustration and stopping a play session short because of its inability to let me do what I should be able to do rather than genuine challenge, there’s a serious problem. When I need to reach something hanging over a pit of lava, I shouldn’t be accidentally falling into said pit over and over again because I’m trying to pick something up with the stylus. Situations like these happened often enough that I’d either turn the game off outright or skip to the next mission if I still had some patience in me. Speaking of skipping puzzles, this is something Scribblenauts handles pretty well. Every stage completed earns “Ollars,” money used to buy things. New worlds are purchased with Ollars, as are new player avatars and the like. Each world has ten puzzle oriented stages and ten action oriented stages. Of course, even the action ones are really puzzles, they just involve more platform-navigating or combat and obstacles. What’s great is that after you complete a few, you’ve opened up all of them in a given section, but you don’t need to complete them all to move on. So if you get really stumped or frustrated on certain puzzles, you can always ignore them and move on and come back later. If it weren’t for this function, the game would be much less user-friendly (on top of the other issues going on), but with this safety net in tact it makes it easier to overlook the problems and move on; enough, at least, to continue enjoying the positive traits it has to offer. There’s plenty of puzzles to undertake, as well. I played for about 6-7 hours and definitely had a lot of puzzles leftover I hadn’t completed, not just because of frustration but just lack of time to do so. Some puzzles I could complete in less than 10 seconds while others had me rattling around for upwards of a half hour at a time. Players can also create their own levels and share them online, but this was a function I wasn’t able to access at the time of review. -Solving Everything- Scribblenauts lives up to its potential of giving players power as far as their creativity will reach, utilizing a surprisingly high number of objects that generally function well given their sheer quantity. The game’s controls need some serious work, however, as they detract from the experience and physically make the game more frustrating than it needs to be if only because the D-pad can’t be used to control your character and the stylus ought only do one thing at a time and not two or three in this case. Overall, Scribblenauts offers up a lot of room for creativity and is totally worth looking into for what interesting things it does as a game, but its physical, practical elements took a hit as a consequence of its creativity, thus holding it back from being a must-play DS title. If a sequel can be made that fixes these technical issues and streamlines the interface, it’ll deserve a permanent spot in your DS library to pop in from time to time, but as is, I’d say a rental would be fit for most, and if you’re the sort who is less frustrated by its flaws, then you’ll get a lot of value out of it, certainly enough worthy of a purchase. -High Score- 6/10 (If there’s anything I failed to mention about the game that you’re curious about, do ask — I read all of the comments you guys leave and try to answer them, and I have even edited some of my reviews to fill in gaps I may have missed.)
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GoNintendo review: Scribblenauts by D3stiny_Sm4sher
