SCRIBBLENAUTS

[Doctorpeter]

Have someone heard about it?
It will come to ds this winter and is a game about making real everything you name.

[Align]

I'll just copypaste what I've posted on other forums...
Unimpressive trailer, read stories instead
This could potentially be part of the E3 thread(s) but it deserves special mention.
1:

I had played all the big titles at E3. Private showings of God of War III, Heavy Rain, Alan Wake. But at 4:00 on Thursday, I was wondering around the show floor, wondering what else I had to see. I saw a small little booth for "Scribblenauts!" in the Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment section. I mean, who goes to that booth? But I remember hearing about it on GAF, and so I decided to check it out.

Best game of E3? Without a fucking doubt. Anyone who says otherwise did not play Scribblenauts. Best game of all time? Jesus Christ, I don't know, maybe. It's a game that challenges your IMAGINATION. No other game has ever done that.

So listen to this story. I was in the early levels; I didn't quite have an idea of how ridiculously in-depth the database was. I was summoning things like ladders, glasses of water, rayguns, what have you. But I reached a level with zombie robots, and the zombie robots kept killing me. Rayguns didn't work, a torch didn't work, a pickaxe didn't work. In my frustration, I wrote in "Time Machine". And one popped up. What the fuck? A smile dawned on my face. I hopped in, and the option was given to me to either travel to the past or the future. I chose past. When I hopped out, there were fucking dinosaurs walking around. I clicked one, and realized I could RIDE THEM. So I hopped on a fucking DINOSAUR, traveled back to the present, and stomped the shit out of robot zombies. Did you just read that sentence? Did you really? I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES. This game is unbelievable. Impossible. There's nothing you can't do.

Holy fucking shit.

2:

Seriously... numerous people put this to test, and they all came back blown away at the game's ability to render anything from scuba tanks, to unicorns, to Cthulhu, to the Internet meme keyboard cat. It was equally impressive that beyond just summoning anything I could think of, that these objects or creatures then worked with the environment in ways that made sense. Summoning Cthulhu and a wyvern resulted in a battle to the death, while summoning objects like wings allowed my character to soar and reach objects that would otherwise be unobtainable since they were up high (alternatively I could have probably summoned a ladder to reach higher objects).

3:

The Nintendo DS is rife with platforming games, but not a single one is like Scribblenauts. In this game, you guide a cute kid named Maxwell throughout a world, which consists of 220 increasingly difficult levels. The one common theme that draws all of these levels together is the way that you conquer the obstacles that lie before you: think of a solution, type it out on the touch screen, and that object will appear before you, ready to be used. With tens of thousands of objects in the game, it's awfully hard to think of something that the game doesn't have in it (provided you're not thinking of such an abstract concept as communism).

Who's Making This Game: Scribblenauts is being developed by 5th Cell, a studio with a history of charming and creativity-driven DS games. The company most recently brought us Lock's Quest, but before that it made Drawn to Life, a platformer in which you actually drew your main character. So it's a team with a good track record for taking interesting ideas for how to use the DS touch screen and putting them into action.

What the Game Looks Like: It's 2D platformer with a rough, hand-drawn art style, but a style that's also cute and appealing at the same time. It's quite similar to the look of Drawn to Life. The objects that you call into the world aren't terribly detailed, but with the sheer number of them stored in the system, that's entirely understandable.

What There Is to Do: The game is split into traditional platforming levels and smaller, more deliberate puzzles. In the puzzles, you're given a quandary and told to find a solution by using objects that you think of on your own. One example that we saw put the player on one side of a small island, and a star (your goal) on the other side beyond a tall wall. The easiest solution is to write the word jetpack, have it appear, pick it up, and attach it to Maxwell and let him fly over the wall. But if you want to get more creative, you can spawn a dolphin into the water, a diving helmet for Maxwell, and ride the friendly dolphin under the island to the other side.

The platforming levels are more traditional 2D, run-and-jump fare. You might encounter a wall too high for Maxwell to leap over, so a quick solution would be to spawn a ladder and climb it. If you reach a gap too wide to leap across, you can simply spawn a plank of wood to cover it up. These sound easy, but some of the later levels that we saw were pretty nasty. The difficulty definitely ramps up as the game goes on. At one point, we encountered a level with deadly sharks in the water between you and your goal. It took us a few tries to figure out the best solution as we continued to get eaten over and over, before realizing those same dolphins that we used earlier would actually fight the sharks on our behalf. That, or you could just drop a toaster in the water and electrocute them to death.

Adding more replay value is the fact that you can return to all of the levels that you've beaten to edit them with the level-editing tool, and replay them in an advanced difficulty mode that remembers which objects you used last time and prohibits you from using them again.

How the Game Is Played: Every bit of movement is done with the touch screen. You tap where you want Maxwell to go, and he'll automatically jump over small obstacles and gaps. You punch in letters with the stylus to write objects, and then drag and drop them wherever you want them to go. In fact, the only buttons that you use are on the directional pad, which is for moving the camera to scope out terrain that you haven't reached yet.

What They Say: The official Web site asks, "What if anything you could think of could be used to help you in a video game?"

What We Say: Well, it obviously doesn't have everything you can think of, but it's sure close. All sorts of things from shark repellent to the specter of death are in there for you to type up, call into the world, and use for solving puzzles and traversing over 2D platforming environments. We really enjoyed what we played of Scribblenauts. You can expect to see more on the game in the very near future

God vs Kraken

[Sindhi]

Sounds fabulous. If any of you have ever read The Field, by Lynne McTaggert, (a journalist who compiled research on how consciousness affects reality), the underlying theory is that there is this infinite field of unbounded consciousness, of dormant energy, out of which infintessimal particles of matter are created and disappear, and the only thing that makes them stay in this reality is our putting our attention on them (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, etc.)... hmmmmmm...... and the closer one gets to higher stages of enlightenment, the more you have the ability to rtam (a Sanskrit word meaning to create that which you desire). So, playing with the underlying nature of reality in a gaming format? Yee-hah!

[Doctorpeter]

well not already i will read it.

[Quemaqua]

This game does indeed look fantastic.  I also discovered these guys also made the kickass Lock's Quest for DS, which I never heard of until quite a while after it released.  Turns out it's a really good game and quite underrated.  Hopefully this game turns out to be a breakthrough for them and somebody actually gives it some press.

[Doctorpeter]

I still haven't tried lock quest.i should try. I am not very good  at strategy games...

[Arachne]

This should get bumped, because this game rocks. I've played it before, and it is so much fun and so addicting.
The controls aren't perfect, but it more than makes up for it in zaniness. I say you should take a look at a gameplay video, or just go buy it. It's one of those games you can just pick up and play, with tons of puzzles and almost limitless ways to solve them. It's great to pass around when you have friends over, too.

[Alphasoldier]

Honestly, I got bored of this game pretty early.

It's epic that you can summon almost anything you want and it was fun the first few hours, but eventually everything only has a certain reaction, which after a few hours of puzzling gets old real quickly.

I played this game, I finished it, I will most likely not play it again, but it's more fun in company anyway.

[Glamador]

They delivered on their promises.  Which is to say, you could summons a metric f**kton of stuff.  And all that stuff will function in the way it should with the world.  What they REALLY dropped the ball on was how the things in the world REACT to those functions.  Collision physics, controls, enemy detection, everything was piss poor.  Truly god awful.

I enjoyed playing most of the levels, but I find in a game where the point is to be creative...they really stifle your options far too much to be truly enjoyable for any period of time.