Shortly after E3, the hype for Scribblenauts shot somewhere into the stratosphere. I didn’t even hear about the game until the last day of the show. I finally found a no-wait kiosk for Arkham Asylum and, as I left, I noticed a decent crowd huddled around a DS game. I thought Batman was an anomaly and that there was no way Warner Brothers was putting out anything else that was reasonably interesting, so I chalked the crowd up as a fluke or one of those miserable booth tours. I took note of the game’s name and then left in search of something else (which I think wound up being Sin and Punishment 2).
Back in the hotel room, when I was supposed to be writing articles, I was checking gaf and saw the fuck-all amazing post that kick started the hype for Scribblenauts. Apparently, you could write anything, provided it was a noun and non copyrighted, and it would appear, with complete functionality, in the game. The premise of using those items to solve puzzles was secondary; the limitless potential of the five figure word list represented a step not yet taken in sandbox design. Hell, before that I considered sandbox to go hand in hand with open world, and I never considered giving the player near-unlimited choice in a mechanical context.
Hype went through the roof, but, upon release and reviews fell back down to manageable levels. Allegedly the control was completely fucked, a sad fact that I’m starting to come to terms with. I’ve only played through the first twenty levels, but I can already feel frustration building, and I’m weary of what more complex goals might require. I get why you’re not supposed to have direction control over Maxwell–you’re not controlling him, you’re just a God to his world–but contextual sense shouldn’t over ride basic accessibility. It would have been a sacrifice and, yeah, you would have had to simultaneously hold the stylus in an awkward manner, but it would have made the game so much better. Almost every issue I have with Scribblenauts, on some level, boils down to the frustrating controls.
But I suppose those flaws arrive when you shoot for the stars with a bottle rocket. I don’t know much about 5th Cell, but I can’t imagine the DS’s technical capabilities matching up with the incredible potential of a game like Scribblenauts. Sure, certain items, like jetpack and rocket pack, were bound to overlap, but I’ll forever wonder what a more seasoned team at a big name developer could have done with the concept. Maybe shit didn’t have to overlap, or maybe the control could have been arranged in a more manageable way. We’ll never know, at least not directly.
Maybe that’s the way it had to be, maybe Scribblenauts had to happen the way it did. Someone else could use it as a template, learn from its mistakes, and reimagine a new way to implement the do-anything mechanic. Scribblenauts probably won’t win any high score Metacritic awards, but it should absolutely without question be experienced by anyone who is vague familiar with interactive entertainment. Like Wii Sports, you show it to people, regardless of their interest in gaming, and it blows their fucking minds. The concept alone is awesome, and for that it will forever be essential to the gaming lexicon. “Like Scribblenauts” will be a comparison thrown around much like GTA (or Mario 64, Doom, etc); its contribution is far more valuable than the failure of its execution. Like the original top-down Grand Theft Auto, the original got the ball rolling, but the inevitable refinement is what’s going to set the world on fire.
