That chafing aside, Super Scribblenauts is a good game and a wonderful toy, a showcase for the interesting, usually hilarious possibilities of “emergent gameplay,” play that arises from the real-time interaction of objects and properties rather than from scripted events. It’s not a total fun-killer - really, it’s no different than any other limitation of in-game freedom -but contrasted with the infinite bounty of the dictionary system, any feeling of restriction chafes. You are forced into trial-and-error recombination of nouns and adjectives until the game’s unintuitive Moon logic is satisfied. With the levels made less open-ended, even as the player’s available options were expanded by orders of magnitude, you end up in situations where a solution that seems like it ought to work just doesn’t. There are far fewer action-oriented challenges - although the solid new controls could have handled them better - and a greater focus on straight-up puzzles. There’s an actual game here, and its style is markedly different from its predecessor. It is pure fun just fooling around with the functionally infinite possibilities, watching the chaos that ensues when, say, carnivorous tree meets foolish delicious baby. It’s quite another when you get to specify a fire-breathing leftist pathologist. It’s one thing to ask the universe for a pathologist. The bigger innovation in Super Scribblenauts is the addition of 9,000-plus adjectives to the dictionary, and the geometric explosion of complexity they create. I’ll never understand why 5th Cell didn’t do this in the first place. Moving your guy directly with the pad, rather than issuing vague suggestions with the stylus, immediately improves everything. The first thing you’ll notice is that the frustrating, imprecise stylus-only control scheme that leeched so much of the joy from the first game has been replaced with tight d-pad controls. As a game, it was only halfway there but Super Scibblenauts takes it a lot further down the track. Scibblenauts developers 5th Cell got props for even trying such a mad thing.Īs a proof-of-concept, Scibblenauts was a triumph. Crossbow, baby, rhinoceros, helicopter, diamond, yogurt, God - anything in the game’s 20,000-word-plus dictionary could be summoned forth to interact with the game’s world. After its showing at the E3 trade show in June, players and press had their imaginations fired by its insane-on-paper premise: a puzzle/action game in which your tools are almost any nouns you could come up with. The first Scibblenauts, released just last year, was a hit before it sold one unit. My favorites are those sequels that are less like obligatory returns to the money well and more like refinements - games that have the feel of a good idea working its way to perfection.
Scribblenauts no download just play series#
Sequels come in many different flavors, from the yearly iterations of sports series to the budget-busting megasequels of the triple-A franchises.