Scribblenauts (DS)

Scribblenauts
5th Cell / Warner Bros.

Reviewed by Anthony

All right, I admit it. I bought into the hype. I heard the stories about the game, watched that video where they knock over the cans in creative ways, and skimmed through a guide, ogling at the words they crammed in there (They added _____? Ha ha, how droll!) Unfortunately, Scribblenauts not only didn’t live up to my expectations, it left me with an absolutely baffled feeling. How in the world can a game get away with such glitchy and poor programming in this day and age, and why do I want to vomit upon seeing some outlets give this a perfect score?

I probably don’t have to summarize, but here goes just in case you don’t know. Scribblenauts is a puzzle/action hybrid game that has you control a character as he goes through lava and high water to obtain a “Starite” or make one appear. Along the way, you can open up a typing pad and summon an object into the world to help you accomplish those tasks. The idea is that by summoning ‘any item you can dream of’, that you can follow your dreams however you want, towards destiny. The execution is far less epic than that, though.

What’s good:
- Admittedly, they have a pretty impressive library of items that were all drawn, and each has to have certain aspects programmed into it. Does it float? Does it burn? Does it consider murdering your main character a hobby? Certainly I can’t discount them for the work it took to realize all of the thousands of objects.
- When Scribblenauts is at its best, the game can really give you a mental workout in trying to come up with a way to counter the numerous traps in your way. Often I found the shorter levels to be enjoyable when they simply asked me to fulfill the requests of some characters on screen. No doubt, the game has its moments.
- There’s a nice dose of humor within the game at times. References to things like Ceiling Cat, and a level based on Bioshock telling you to not harm the “smaller sister” are worth a chuckle. They did try to have fun with it at times, and I appreciate that.

What’s neutral:
- The level creation option was a nice thought, and though you can do some amusing things with it, it’s a bit too restrained to really produce anything of value. You can only program Action stages (goal already visible) and you have to use pre-made stage layouts to work with. Though you can do funny things with it, like make God defend Hell with his life, or make God afraid of a salad, or make God attack a baby, or make a Priest fight God, the likelihood of doing anything truly substantial with the stages is low.
- The option to replay a level three times using different items to earn a gold medal is a decent attempt at adding replay value. However, there are exploits one can use to get around it, and typically, multiple similar items will have the exact same effect. In other words, it’s exploitable, and not even that hard to do, unless you’re dealing with the horrendous physics and glitches in trying to do so.

What’s bad:
- Controls! Piloting Maxwell, the main character, is, to put it gently, horrendous. For starters, mapping the entirety of his controls to the touch screen rather than the D-pad was an egregious misstep. Maxwell and his soulless eyes run like a maniac to whatever general area you tap on the screen. He’ll then automatically jump for you when he deems it necessary. This often makes minor adjustments impossible because there’s no way to regulate his enthusiasm, and the touch screen is simultaneously used to interact with any object on the stage. As a result, you’re bound to witness several dozen instances of Maxwell spazzing out, jumping up and down, leaping to his death, and not knowing when to fly or jump. Considering that you can’t control Maxwell when interacting with objects anyway, I see no argument for why they didn’t at least give the option to control him directly.
- Physics! You know how those are important in games, so that when you shoot a gun at an enemy, he doesn’t go flying across the room and breaking through the ceiling? Well, 5th Cell apparently hates physics and decides to do things its own way. As a result, sometimes objects will go flying or careening off the screen for seemingly no reason, or react in ways that should be impossible. If a bridge is safely sitting on two edges of a cliff, how is it that the whole bridge springs upward and buckles into the ground when stepped on? Documenting every case in which something very impossible happens with an item in game would take a review in itself.
- Glitches! You remember those things that used to happen often a few decades ago? 5th Cell misses those days. Thus you can look forward to situations that I came across, such as when I was supposed to collect a diamond amongst a pack of hungry wolves (I have no idea). But upon nearing the diamond, the wolves started hopping onto the diamond, and eventually it fell through the floor and out of the screen. So wait, I ‘lost’ because of that? This happened several times actually, and back when Superman 64 did it, they mocked it as one of the worst games ever.
- Repetition! You know how there are like, hundreds of levels in the game? Well what if I told you that it feels like a good 80% of the puzzle stages involve getting object C from point A to point B, and 80% of action stages involve killing all obstacles and then navigating to the Starite? For a game that advertises so much open-ended gameplay, the number of times I was attaching a rope/vine/wire/cable to some object/character and dragging it to another side of the screen during puzzle levels was absurd. During action levels, once I figured out that “Ooze” was a versatile and immortal destroyer of worlds, almost every level became about letting Ooze slay my enemies and then navigating through minor obstructions to the goal.
- Pointlessness! This aspect pervades so much of the Scribblenauts experience. For one, forget about the apparent 10,000+ items they’ve made available in the game, because a good 9,900 of them are pointless to beating the game beginning to end. They put hundreds of food items in the game, many of which I’ve never even heard of, and there’s a whopping one puzzle in the whole game that asks you to provide food. Otherwise, characters may just eat them. Add that to things like hundreds of specific species of animals that only exist to sit there and maybe attack others/be attacked, or a whole bunch of buildings and structures that you’ll never, ever have to summon to complete any challenge. Part of that 10,000 number includes items they specifically made just for creating the levels too. Was anyone at any point going to really type in “Large Cracked Wood Pillar” to try to complete some challenge? It’s like an RPG advertising 10,000 available weapons, and 9,800 of them are Wooden Sticks with 1 Attack.
- Shallow Programming! Animals mostly exist to murder each other on site (I didn’t know that any dog immediately kills any cat), a Tailor doesn’t react to clothes, a Lifeguard won’t react to an infant in the water, wearing Armor doesn’t appear to protect you in any way, being in a Fallout Shelter or various vehicles won’t stop you from being damaged, Police love to shoot you, being struck by Lightning tickles, and placing Rats into a hot oven is the same as storing your Rats. Perhaps the game could’ve benefited from say, about a hundredth of the items included if it meant they could’ve added more dynamic AI to the items included.
- Missing refinements! Making a typo brings up a suggestion box that may or may not be helpful, but more odd is that for the myriad of compound words, a minor typo can mean summoning the complete wrong item. When I write “Flyingg Car” I don’t get a “did you mean ‘Flying Car’, ‘Car’” etc., it just summons a regular Car, ignoring what it assumes was a pointless adjective. I’d be worried that this affects the “Par” challenge of trying to beat a stage with as few items as possible, except that it’s also pretty pointless. Earning a few more “Ollars” from dealing with issues like this is meaningless when I easily bought every bonus item in the game with plenty to spare despite not even making the effort to do so.

The real problem here is that I could go on. The number of times that something bafflingly stupid happened in the game along with the variety of nonfunctional elements is truly staggering. I went into the game with moderately high hopes, and I should’ve been worried when in trying to give a Chef a whisk, Maxwell proceeded to violently beat the Chef over the head with the whisk instead. But I laughed it off thinking “What an odd single occurrence!” only to be very disappointed with all that continued to transpire throughout.

I appreciate innovation and all, but it’s pretty much always assumed that whatever company is innovating has at least a general grasp on how to program a modern video game. To see a game with such shoddy physics, controls and interaction get high scores is rather insulting. I’ve seen games like Avalon Code, Knights in the Nightmare, The World Ends With You, and Henry Hatsworth just within the last year be very innovative offerings on the DS, and none of those games can have you lose because some object in the level made the goal fall through solid ground. To scrutinize unique games normally and then laud this game because the concept seems ‘really cool’ is ridiculous.

Sure, there are a few bright spots in the game and moments where I genuinely liked what they did. That said, that ratio of enjoyment to sheer boredom/frustration was probably somewhere around 15%/85%. I remember in grade school back in the day, 63% was failure. Just watch videos of it if you think the concept is cool. At best, if you -really- love the concept of the game and are willing to soldier on through all of the missteps, bad programming and repetition it throws at you, the one thing the game has is plenty of replay value. Retrying stages in new ways and trying to think of items you’re not sure are in the game or not could certainly provide a lot of fun. I, for one, would’ve rather been able to type “Much Better Game” and have that appear instead.