Scribblenauts (DS)

Scribblenauts has [fill in the blank]!
9/15/2009 8:43 AM | 7 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Early in Scribblenauts I'm brought to a mountain road, where my rooster-helmeted character Maxwell finds himself amidst a traffic jam. Scroll to the right and there's a cow standing in front of the vehicles, oblivious to the situation she has caused.

"Clear the way to get him home!" the game instructs me.

On my first try I misinterpret the hint. There's a row of houses just beyond the cow, one for each of the four cars trapped on the other side. Easy, I think, I need to off the cow.

What would hate a cow?

I click on the notepad icon in the corner and type "BUTCHER." A mustachioed man in white appears floating above the cow. He's brandishing an enormous cleaver. I drop him in front of the cow, and he immediately sets to work, hacking the cow mercilessly. An animated thought bubble appears above the cow's head. The cow is terrified.

Within seconds, the cow collapses into hamburger -- literally, with a little pixilated beef patty taking her place -- and the butcher's work is done. Then a truck rams my butcher from behind, crushing him beneath its front wheels. "TRY AGAIN," the game tells me.

On my second try I realize my mistake. All the way to the right of the level is a green pasture. And I notice that there was a man lurking among the houses. It's another butcher, of course. I need to find a way to get the cow to her pasture, safe from the butcher's blade.

First I try offing the butcher. I make a "bully," a frowning kid in a wife beater with a bandage on his cheek, and drop him in front of the butcher. Instead of landing on the ground he vanishes into the house in the background. I try again, placing the bully more carefully, and succeed. But he's no match for the butcher. Fair enough. I try a more professional killer, a masked "villain." He goes down, too.

I'm losing my patience, so I bring in someone who hasn't let me down yet: Satan. He's an angry little devil. But he, too, gets cleaved by the butcher. Maybe an "animal rights activist" (indistinguishable from a "vegetarian" and "hippie" in the game) will argue the butcher into leaving his violent ways. Nope.

It's time to switch my strategy, something I'm quite used to doing even at this early stage in Scribblenauts. If I give the butcher another animal to cut up, he might be satisfied, or exhausted, and will leave the cow alone. Feeling generous, I try an elephant. But both elephant and butcher do nothing. I try to encourage them by moving the elephant closer. The butcher mounts the elephant, becoming, in effect, a bloodthirsty warlord. The house-sized elephant crushes the cow, the anxious drivers plow into the hamburger and the elephant, and I'm asked to "TRY AGAIN."

An attempt to "flood" the cars and butcher out of the road actually obliterates everything on the stage.

I don't remember what exactly my solution was, except that it involved growing wings on Maxwell and attempting to fly the cow to safety. We only made it halfway to the pasture before the cars piled onto the cow as usual. But the cow lived; the glowing, star-shaped "Starite" needed to escape the level somehow appeared; and I scrambled to grab it before anything in the level changed to undo my victory.

Scribblenauts is frustrating. This is not a surprise, since its premise is that you can write the name of any object -- excluding vulgarities, abstractions and copyrighted objects -- and it will appear in the game and behave as itself. You'll be skeptical until the game begins to fulfill even your most esoteric orders. So you expect, and maybe forgive, that many things will not work as planned.

But Scribblenauts places its radical, even revolutionary, mechanic at odds by bowing to conventional goal-driven gameplay. The game's 10 settings house two types of levels: "puzzle" and "action." In the former you have to resolve a given scenario (like the aforementioned lost cow) to make the Starite appear; in the latter you find the Starite out of reach and have to devise a way to grab it.

When your eye's on the Starite, you aren't as focused on discovering new object interactions, as the game humbly suggests after its tutorial. You're more focused on how clunky the game feels. How hard it is to get a person into a vehicle with you; how hard it is to steer that vehicle without crashing and burning it in a puddle; how hard it is even to place an especially large object like a vehicle, which might go flying into the heavens in a disheartening show of explosive friction. How easy it is to send Maxwell running headfirst into a pool of lava when you just wanted to build a bridge, because object manipulation and character movement are both touch-controlled. How often your things really don't behave as you would expect. (A frog stares perplexedly at a fly? A beekeeper runs screaming from a bee? A tornado demolishes a black hole?)