Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

Scribblenauts for the DS gives you the power of words

Scribblenauts gives you puzzles to solve and a nearly endless array of items …

One of the games that I kept hearing about at E3 was Scribblenauts. Sure, people wanted to play God of War 3, and everyone was raving about the Last Guardian trailer, but everyone I saw told me I had to go play Scribblenauts. With some anticipation I headed over to the Warner Bros. booth and had myself a demo. What did I find? I found that this may be my game of the show... or at least the best, most pleasant surprise.

Scribblenauts is a DS title from the team that brought you Drawn to Life, and the idea is simple: you have a man on the screen, and he has to fulfill a goal in each of the over 200 increasingly tough levels. Maybe you have to rescue a cat, or grab a star, or make it past a shark. How do you do this? By typing in the names of items, and using those items. That's it, that's the gimmick.

Of course, there are tens of thousands of items, and each one does something. To get that star, you can type in ladder and climb up. You can type trampoline and bounce to it. You can type in giraffe and ride over to the star. You can type in rocket pack and zip up to grab it. You can type Chimera and... well, it won't help you get the star, but there will be a Chimera running around.

It gets even crazier when you're playing levels in which God, Albert Einstein, and a Kraken are running around. Why are they there? Because they are objects in the game.

It becomes something of a challenge to find an item that isn't supported; we're promised tens of thousands of things, more than your mind can handle. Items will also work together: you can type grill and get a grill, and then type steak and get a steak. And then cook the steak and feed it to animal to sneak past. If you have to refresh a character you can type rain cloud and soothe him with a gentle shower, or type lemonade and give him a drink, or type hose and spray him down. Get creative. Try anything that comes into your mind. The game's motto is "Write Anything, Solve Everything," and it's certainly fitting.

I walked away with a big grin on my face; this is one to pick up when it's released closer to the end of the year, on the Nintendo DS.

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