It's been a while since its release, and the guys at GAME wouldn't let me trade it. I'm now stuck with this crap, and I see no other option. I must at least get some use of it. I didn't pay over 300 NOK for the game to just sit there and taunt me, so I'll taunt it right back.
Scribblenauts is a game for the DS made by 5th Cell. It's a puzzle and action game for ages 12 and up. Lil' Timmy ain't playing this one.
The player plays as Maxwell; a guy (or a kid?) with a weird hat which makes him look like a rooster, and he has a thing which allows him to summon everything in the world as long as it isn't copyrighted. Maxwell is on a quest to collect a whole bunch of stars. This confuses me; why can't he just summon the stars with the thing? Are stars copyrighted?
Gameplay:
The gameplay mostly consists of solving puzzles for various people in various environments. But I quickly found out that these people are bigger assholes than real-life assholes. For example: In this one level, I was supposed to clear the road for some cars. I got the cow out of the way (Which was a ***** to do), and the cars responded by driving me over which caused me to fail the level. Most stages are like this. There are 9 worlds which consist of 11 puzzle stages and 11 action stages. That's 198 stages of doing random tasks for random people to get a star. And what does the star do? Nothing at all. Why does he even need them? Is he trying to steal the universe? Is he a kleptomaniac? And why can't he just summon a star with the thing he uses? And the controls? They are horrible. You move by tapping on the screen, and you can't control how fast Maxwell will move. So tapping a somewhere on the screen causes Maxwell to sprint towards it, no matter what's in his way. He will gladly run into deadly spikes. (Which naturally grows near stars). You also tap on things you want to use. This can be a problem since most objects are very small on the small DS screen. And the physics are very weird in this game. A rope will flail around like an eight-year old kid on sugar.
Story:
The story of Scribblenauts is pretty straight forward. Maxwell wants stars. Stars happen to grow on trees (literally), and he has a weird thing which lets him summon everything. Except copyrighted things, of course. I don't know what the thing is called, so I'm just going to call it "The writing thing". No one knows why Maxwell has this writing thing in his possession, but it has the 5th Cell logo on it, so we can only wonder. It almost feels weird. Like he is almighty. I mean, he can even summon Satan and the Large Hadron Collider. It almost seems like...
Graphics:
The graphics are okay, I guess. It's on the DS, so I didn't expect much. Everything is made in a cartoony way. It almost looks everything in the gameworld are props. It looks like things are stapled together; even the dogs. What the Hell kind of place is this? And there is no blood in the game. It's just those dust clouds you see in cartoons. Maybe the world of Scribblenauts isn't real. Maybe it's just a stageshow, and you are the audience. This reminds me of another game...
Sounds:
I strongly suggest that you play with the sound off. Seriously. The songs are very annoying, and not very varied. You can actually buy more tracks at the in-game store. The currency they use in Fucked-up Land is Ollars (Yes, that's really what it's called). Anyway, the rest of the sounds are okay. Not really much to say about it.
Bottom line:
It's a fun game to experiment with, but the controls will make you kick babies in anger. You can see that the developers put a lot of work into adding several dictionaries in the game. I learned new words. You can summon the weirdest things. God? Check. Large Hadron Collider? Check. Velociraptor? Armadillo? Satan? Cthulhu? Child molesters? Check, check, check, check and WTF? This game will bring you some fun, but the controls will see to it that you are tortured. Don't even bother.
