Scribblenauts: summon chicken hats in-game. Also IRL when you pre-order. :
12-08-2008, 09:36 AM
How the hell have we gone without discussing this potentially wonderful DS game? It's being made by 5th Cell, the creators of Lock's Quest and Drawn to Life, if that tells you anything.
So this game. It... uh. It's a little hard to describe, but it looks wonderfully unique. You know what, you'd be better served by watching this video.
If you're behind a filter, let me try to explain it to you.
You're this guy. There's a thing in a tree that, in typical video game fashion, you desire. But they way you get it is anything but typical... supposedly, it's limited only by your imagination.
TAKE ONE: Write the word "ladder." A ladder appears. Your guy takes the ladder to the tree, climbs it, and gets the thing.
TAKE TWO: Write the word "football." A football appears. Your guy picks it up and hucks it at the thing, knocking it out of the tree into easy reach.
TAKE THREE: Write the word "beaver." A beaver appears. Pick it up, and it'll eat through the trunk, knocking the tree down and letting you easily pick up the thing.
TAKE FOUR: Write the word "tsunami." A tsunami appears, destroying utterly everything, including yourself. Woops.
The developers promise you can draw absolutely anything, and it'll behave exactly like you'd expect. Light objects move differently than heavy objects. Animals can be predators or prey. Objects have different levels of flammability. Think Gary's Mod, only with object creation.
I know, you're thinking "whee, I get to play with a bank of 50 or so objects." Nope. The developers absolutely swear on their mothers' graves that EVERYTHING will be in there. The reason the art style is so simple is because they want to program an utterly absurd number of objects for you to create and mess around with.
There's a long interview with the developers here:
Oh wow. I liked the hook of Drawn to Life when I rented it, but I felt like the actual meat of gameplay itself was too rudimentary for my tastes. This sounds ... appealing.
They might not get EVERYTHING (I'm guessing proper nouns are right out), but even if they just get up to 500 or so, that could make for a damn interesting game.
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Let's go see Babeheart. It's about a cute little pig that slaughters the English.
I saw this the other day. It sounds like it'll be a lot of fun.
I will solve every puzzle with a beaver. Every single one.
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rvcontre78 wrote:
This game is all about the racism. I hate to think about all the backlash that will be involved but the truth must be told. The truth about a man who kills people by dropping them from his crane. Political correctness be damned. Damned to the max.
This kind of game seems like it would be susceptible to either frustration from not thinking of the correct word or boredom from it being simply too easy.
Also, I doubt you could get everything. Could you draw "star" and win instantly? Or "gun" and just shoot everything? Or "puzzle-solving machine"?
But I don't know, maybe it will be fun. I do think they have a challenge in front of them though.
Obviously not everything. Otherwise children would be assulting the bad guys with penis swords.
Looks cool though. Seems like a promising developer and Im subrised they arent in a deal with a puplisher yet. Seems like this is the kind of creativity that gets bought up.
Doesn't need "everything." Just enough stuff to make it truly interesting. For example, if you hadn't thought "football," they'd probably be smart enough to include "rock" to knock it down, or "boomerang" for it to swoop around and return the thing.
For each puzzle, really, they only need a lot of things capable of doing something with the particular puzzle. Sure, you probably see a Starite in a tree and think, "if I had a rocket launcher, I could shoot the tree down!" That probably won't be in the game. But a player ought to be smart enough to think of objects that can either knock down the item or knock down the tree or climb up the tree or whatever.