Just Released: Scribblenauts
On September 15th, 2009, Nintendo and 5th Cell released their newest partnership product, Scribblenauts, described as an “emergent puzzle action video game”. In Scribblenauts, you play as Avatar Maxwell (but can customize your avatar if you wish; I personally find his rooster hat pretty cute, yet inexplicable) and you must solve puzzles by calling upon whatever solution (object-driven) you can think of.
Need to climb a wall? Type “helicopter” into the query box and you don’t need to waste the sweat. Need to break a child’s pinata at a birthday party? You can always use the pistol, but you’ll lose points for using a violent method to solve your puzzle. Imagination is key, of course, but often it is the simplest solutions which do the best (the helicopter can be a bit unwieldy at times, for example, so I often call upon the “ladder” instead, but feel horribly boring and dull).
Scribblenaut’s has had a very successful first month of sale. Despite common belief, Scribblenauts is not as children friendly as you might think: if you think “pistol” as a solution for a puzzle was edgy, there is also the options of Jesus, God, and a Hadron Collidor. Try explaining any of those solutions to a 6-10 year old.
Buy Scribblenauts today, available for the Nintendo DS and DSi.
