Scribblenauts - DS

I've been meaning to mention this game forever, and nothing turns up in search, so--

This is a DS game coming out this fall from developer 5th Cell (Drawn To Life, Lock's Quest). It's a 2D platform puzzle game where the object is to reach the star placed in some out-of-the-way spot in each level. You achieve this by writing the name of ANY OBJECT IN THE DICTIONARY which is then generated in the game. They've set some parameters--nothing "adult", no proper nouns, and no more than one or two-word phrases--but other than that the developers are repeatedly insisting that, yes, it's in there. Previews over the course of the past year seem to have had extreme difficulty in stumping the game.

I mention this now because IGN has an updated E3 preview with the sub-head "I became a believer the second I wrote 'keyboard cat'".

I'm still a bit skeptical about how well this will translate to a well-designed puzzle game, but at this point it looks worth buying just to screw around with.

Yeah, I've been watching those pop up on NeoGAF for the last week or two. The TF2 Spy one is the winner.

Just a heads up for NYC peoples--the Nintendo World Store is having an event for this tomorrow at 11 A.M., the developers will be there and you'll be able to buy the game a few days early. (Actually I hear some of the less scrupulous places around here have already broken street date, if you're that anxious.) I may head up there myself.

Awwww. Believe me I wouldn't have handled it any better at his age. Even if he's 32 right now.

What did it actually delete? If he had downloaded DSi games or apps he can just re-download them off of the DSiWare store for free.

Anyway I've played through the first 20 or 30 levels of this. The object-summoning really does work pretty much as advertised. Within certain boundaries it has just about everything. In fact the only reason I've stumped it is because there are a lot of exceptions to the rules that are still in the database--a lot of two-word phrases, some famous proper names (Lincoln, etc.) and internet memes. So it's hard to tell what they've included and what they haven't.

Maxwell is really fiddly to control. In fact you don't really "control" him so much as suggest where he should be. It's not always that important, since you can generate and use an object anywhere in the level, but it can still be frustrating to move him around.

There are a lot of levels, something like 220 of them, half "puzzle" and half "action". Though I've definitely been stumped once or twice already, it's really easy to be "cheap" in the game--the almost unlimited freedom the game gives you means you can re-use a handful of very useful words (like wings) over and over, and while there is a limit to the number of objects allowed on screen, you can move or delete anything you've summoned at any time, anywhere.

But those are just the cons. Even with those caveats the game is still a lot of fun, and when it "clicks" like it's supposed to it's really something special.

"What can I do about this shark in the water? Would a... depth charge kill it? Well fuck me, it worked!"

Urge to kill stylus controls... rising...

I'm about a third of the way through the game content. To be sure, the game deserves some sort of Holy-Shit Special Achievement award for the object database and its seriously impressive contextual relationships--try spawning a magician and a top hat--but the game designed around it is so ungainly it makes one wonder if the entire endeavor is, ultimately, a dead end.

Still, it's entirely possible I'll be asking myself "is this in Scribblenauts?" about every noun I hear of for the rest of my life.