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. Scribblenauts - Video Games - Ds - Puzzle - Scribblenauts'
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