Last Saturday it seemed like Christmas come early - after several months of not much to play, we suddenly remembered upcoming Wii U puzzler Scribblenauts Unlimited was due for a release on the 8th of February. Preferring not to pay the local Tesco's extortionate prices and far too lazy to travel further afield, we hastily placed our order and we went about our business, pencilling in this weekend for some serious time with the lovable word-smith Maxwell, whose magical notebook can be used to summon any object you can think of, using them to solve all manner of puzzles.
Fire extinguisher or hose pipe are the obvious choices, but sometimes it's fun to come up with the most ludicrous and long-winded solution you can.
Then we heard the bad news. Courtesy of a rather serious sounding news blast from Nintendo, it seems that Scribblenauts Unlimited has been held back again in Europe because "some changes need to be implemented" first. Which has taken the wind out of our sails somewhat. While we wouldn't mind too much if there was some incredibly serious, game-breaking bug that needed to be fixed, we're not entirely convinced that can be the case - after all, Scribblenauts hit America in November, in time for the Wii U's launch day, and released in Australia at around the same time. With the press release not confirming quite what the problem was, our money is on some censorship laws somewhere in Europe taking issue at a dodgy translation or two, or that there was the potential to create something offensive in the game's built-in object editor - perhaps a swastika or something.
Either way, a week before release does seem rather last minute, with some rumours suggesting that shops may have even received shipments of the game, and had to send them back. Whatever the reason is, it must be pretty serious to warrant such a reaction, especially when you consider the Wii U now has the ability to push out day one updates for it's games, meaning any problem could have theoretically have been fixed immediately - although that is dependent on your console being hooked up to the internet, which Europeans are statistically less likely to do.
But perhaps the worst news is that poor Maxwell doesn't even have another release date for his game - we have no idea if it'll just be a week, a month or two or perhaps even years. Hopefully we'll get some insight into the situation in the coming weeks - and if we do, you'll be the first to know...
