The legend of the scribblenauts: The "write" stuff
Krish Raghav -
Thursday, June 18, 2009 4:56 PM
So another E3 has come and gone. The yearly extravaganza of fancier explosions, prettier graphics, and sequels reaching fairly ridiculous numbers (Final Fantasy XIV, anyone?). The necessary dose of violence and guns and muscle-flexing machismo to tide over the rabid gaming press for another year. Same old, same old, yeah?
Well, wrong. See, something odd happened this year at E3. A Little known, tiny game basked in the aura of a sudden, unexpected spotlight, and buoyed by the viral power of the Internet, won accolades upon accolades, beating out the big, scary studios to win Game of the Show from a number of gaming magazines.
The little big game that could? Scribblenauts.
It's an unassuming puzzler for the Nintendo DS wrapped in a cloak of cutesy artwork, but with an intriguing central premise. The game has a dictionary, allowing you to summon ANY object you'd like to complete a level.
Example. Suppose you have to collect a star stuck on top of a tree.You could write 'boomerang' and throw it at the star to get it down. Or, if you're a bit ecologically apathetic, you could type 'axe' and cut the tree down. But that's two solutions out a possible tens of thousands. Beavers to chew through the trunk? No problem. Ladders, jetpacks, rocketships to get up the tree? All there. Complex series of levers and pulleys that pluck the star with a push of a button? Possible. Wizard buoyed by balloons? Of course. Dinosaurs? You don't even need to ask. It's a game that rewards imagination like no other.
Scribblenaut's concept is easy to dismiss as hype, or as a gimmick that will never work, or a bag of tricks not really amounting to crunchy, deep gameplay: but its passed every test thrown at it with flying colours.
Of course, there are limitations: no proper nouns, so there goes the dream of beating every level with Chacha Chaudhary.
Adjectives will have to be introduced within the game, meaning you can't summon a 'fast turtle' but you can put in a plain turtle and introduce it to a skateboard.
Even 'God' is in the game, looking like a slightly bemused Zeus. And the developers insist they're not cheating with certain objects: a 'binder' will be different from a 'book', and a 'leopard' different from a 'tiger', for instance.
Scribblenauts went from obscure cult favourite to critical darling by the end of e3, buoyed by a bonkers story about how a certain level was solved by stomping robot zombies using a dinosaur retrieved from a time machine.
The writing on the e3 wall, if you'll pardon the pun, would normally render a story like this impossible. The event, after all, is where you bring out the big guns, and drown the media in a cyclone of hype and hyberbole. That a game could charm the jaded journalists at e3 through sheer word-of-mouth and a simple hands-on demo is both wonderful and encouraging. The game arrives later this year for the Nintendo DS. A few more monhts, then, to see who wins a fight between a 'ninja' and a 'pirate', or what would happen if 'God' were pitted against 'zombies'. That you can actually type a sentence like that
previous one to describe a game is proof enough that Scribblenauts is worth waiting with bated breath for.