Despite the whole host of new announcements at the E3 show back in early June - the Mario games, the new Metroid, even the stuff on other non-Nintendo consoles - the game that ended up stealing the whole show wasn't a flashy HD shooter or a nifty new MotionPlus game, but instead a humble DS title called Scribblenauts.
This was mainly due to a bold claim made by the game's developers: that it was a puzzle game where you could summon any object in the dictionary and use it to solve problems. Like many others, we were intrigued but sceptical. However, now we've played it we're happy to say we're very impressed.
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Scribblenauts sees you in charge of helping a young lad named Maxwell. He's been tasked with collecting a Starite (a small star) on each of the game's 220 levels. In order to do that though he needs your guidance, as well as your ability to spawn any object and place it in the level for him. If there's an enemy in the way, conjure up a shotgun for him. If there's a platform too high for him to reach, make a jetpack for him to strap to his back and fly with. The possibilities are endless.
Seis Matters Naturally, when you have a game that claims to feature almost every object in the dictionary, our first instinct was to try and 'break' Scribblenauts by suggesting really obscure things that it wouldn't have. Fingerless gloves? Yes. A penny farthing bike? Yes. A zoetrope? Yup. While discussing the game on the ONM forums, one of our readers stated, "if it has a seismometer then it'll be the best game ever". That's one sale already then, because it's in there.
Of course, the usefulness of some of these objects is questionable. You're never really going to make much use of a jewellery box, or a taco or a meerkat. But the point is that Scribblenauts gives you the freedom to find this out for yourself, instead of limiting you to 500 words or so and saying "nah, you don't need that" any time you try something else. It's the fact that the only thing stopping you is your imagination.
With so many possibilities, this means each of the game's 220 levels can be tackled in a huge number of different ways. Say you want to cross a river but there's a piranha fish in there, for example. You could give Maxwell a fishing rod, grab the fish and fling it behind you. You could glue a few planks of wood together and make a big bridge to cross over. Or you could be cruel and just drop a toaster in the water to electrocute the fish. These obviously aren't the only ways to do it, there are countless more. Drop a shark in to kill it, lob a grenade in the water, drop a swimmer in there as bait, create a needlessly large space shuttle and use it to fly over the ten-foot gap. Basically, if you can think of it and it's logical (you can't bore it to death with a poetry book, for example) then you can probably do it.
Maxwell's House Scribblenauts' levels are split into two different types: 110 action levels and 110 puzzle levels. The action levels all have a simple goal - there's a Starite sitting somewhere in the stage and Maxwell has to get it. Obviously managing this is no easy feat. Though in the early levels there are some fairly basic obstacles to overcome, as you progress through the game the stages will get more complex and require much more thought in order to get through unscathed. One stage, for example, starts with Maxwell hanging by a rope above a pit of lava, with the Starite in a cage hanging from another rope at the other end of the pit. You need to figure out how to get off your rope, get over to the cage and open it to get the Starite. You might have a dictionary's worth of words to choose from, but that doesn't stop the game from becoming a head-scratcher at times.
The puzzle levels, on the other hand, require a little more thought to master. Each level puts you in a different scenario and gives you a task that you have to perform in order to earn the star. An early level may ask you to protect a picnic from some ants, for example, or to help a short-sighted man read a letter chart during an eye test at an optician's surgery.
While the potential answers in these initial puzzles seem fairly simple (you could drop two walls in between the picnic to block the ants, or simply put glasses on the short-sighted man), doing this will only earn you a silver star for each level. To get a gold star and completely finish the stage you have to solve the puzzle in three different ways, without using any of the words you'd used previously.
So after you've given the glasses to the man you get your Starite and the level ends, but then it starts again and this time you can't use glasses. Solve it in a different way (give him a magnifying glass, maybe) and you'll then have to do it a third time. Again, this doesn't sound so difficult, but this is an early level. The later ones are much larger stages with loads of different obstacles to overcome.
What makes Scribblenauts even more interesting and enjoyable is it's not just a simple case of 'make something appear and use it'. Some of the objects can be interacted with in unique ways and there's all manner of different vehicles that you can drive, animals you can ride and weapons you can fire. What's more, many of these items can be combined with others to make even more complex objects. Want to attack an enemy from a distance? Get a sword and attach a long cable to the end of it for a makeshift whip. When you pick up the sword and swing it, the attached cable swings too and does damage to anyone it hits.
Nauts And Crosses In another nice little touch, you don't even have to try any of the puzzles if you don't want to. The game's title screen also acts as a blank stage where you can choose a background and then just mess around with different objects or characters and watch how they interact without fear of being injured or failing a mission. Create a cheerleader then create a vampire and watch as he bites her and she turns into a female creature of the night. Make God and Satan and watch them fight each other. See if a tiger could beat a lion. See what happens if you put a shark in the ocean then use a bulldozer to push an elephant in with it. The possibilities are - almost - infinite.
Of course, there's nothing in there that could get the game's developers into trouble - so don't expect anything crude in there, and there are no trademarks like Mario, lightsabers or a Wii - but almost everything else can be used, as long as it's an object that can be found in the dictionary.
It's this freedom of choice that's making us excited about Scribblenauts. The early version we've been playing has already dominated our tube journeys to and from the office, and that's just messing around with the title screen. There are a few physics and control issues to iron out but otherwise this is shaping up to one of the most astonishing, imaginative and innovative games we've played in recent times. On any system.
