Back in April, we told you about a new game in the pipeline - then known only as Scribblenauts 2, the sequel to one of our favourite DS games, Scribblenauts. Now, four months and a name change later, we got to play Super Scribblenauts at Gamescom, a yearly games convention, in Cologne. And it was awesome.
The starite. We died so many times trying to retrieve this.
For those of you who don't know, the original Scribblenauts was a clever little game that challenged you to collect a 'Starite', that had been cunningly hidden or placed in each level, by using, well, whatever you could think of. Literally. Anything you wanted to use in the game to solve a puzzle, could be used - all you had to do, to "summon" it, was write it in our hero, Maxwell's magic notebook, and it appeared. From a rope, to Jesus, you could add anything you wanted to the levels, and use them to reach your goal.
The basic premise of Super Scribblenauts is the same as the first game - summon things to solve the puzzles, and earn the starite, except this time, there's been one big change - adjectives. Now, whenever you summon an object, you can customise it however you see fit - from a blue car, to an angry fridge (which actually acts aggressively and pushes the other characters around), to a fire-breathing, rideable, flying tomato, which the fat man you just summoned then decides he wants to eat. Because he's a fat man, and therefore he's probably hungry. Everything you summon in Super Scribblenauts has its own mind, and acts as you'd expect it to - cars are driveable, dragons and sharks attack people, and, well, fat people eat things. On the plus side, weight loss has never been easier than in Super Scribblenauts - simply summon a slimming cake, which the fat man makes a bee-line for, because its food, (and, well, he's fat), he eats it, and poof! Suddenly he's a normal size again. If only real life were that easy.
In the original Scribblenauts, there were two types of levels - action and puzzle, with over one hundred of each on offer. In the action levels, the goal was to simply reach the starite, which was normally somewhere out of reach, behind bars or surrounded by various perils. The puzzle levels gave you a hint - such as 'help him do his job' (for a level with a lumberjack and a tree), which you then had to act on to recieve the starite and finish the level. To help the lumberjack do his job, you could of course do many different things - summon an chainsaw to cut your way through, a beaver to gnaw down the tree, or a helicopter with a rope to pull the tree over - the only limit was your imagination. Which could be why I struggled.
Hint: Help him do his job. Whereas before you were limited to a flamethrower, now we'd use a fire-breathing, rideable, robotic Jesus. Yeah!
Super Scribblenauts should bring the same number of puzzle levels more or less, around a third of which are special 'adjective levels', in which you'll need to use adjectives to get the starite, but will only have about twenty action levels. Having proven to be the less popular of the two level types with fans of the original, these action levels have been overhauled for Super Scribblenauts to make them a lot more complicated than before - where you could apparently solve every level using a vending machine and a pair of handcuffs - which seems a bit of a cheat to us...
Proving popular with adults and children alike, the original Scribblenauts was a massive hit - in fact, the only thing that ever really got criticised was the controls. Because everything was controlled via the touch screen, you could be setting up a set of stairs, in order to jump over a giraffe, and instead of you moving the stairs, Maxwell would go careening into the steps, sending them flying. Or he would go running straight into a shark infested pool and get himself killed. It got more than a bit frustrating at times, and to add to the frustration, the camera had an annoying habit of clicking back to Maxwell while you were in the middle of setting something up on the other side of the level, as far away as the chicken-hat wearing hero as you could possibly get (so that if he did decide to do a runner, he wouldn't be running into your pristinely stacked llamas). Thankfully, these few problems have now been fixed for Super Scribblenauts, as you now have the option of controlling Maxwell's movements with the d-pad (with the stylus handling object placement and the camera), or letting the stylus do everything, and the camera now only snaps back to Maxwell when you poke the picture of his face in the top corner.
The progress bar in the top right corner shows how close you are to getting the starite. In this case, not at all close.
Another thing we sometimes had problems with was that you never knew if you'd given someone the right thing, as there was no feedback. For example, the first level gives you a row of people - a policeman, a chef, a fireman and a doctor and tells you to 'give two of them what they would use in their hands' - yet when you gave them something, there was no way of telling whether you'd given them the "correct" item - until the starite appeared, that is. In Super Scribblenauts, you now get instant feedback in the form of a tick, as well as a little progress bar that fills up, showing you how close you are to getting the elusive starite.
The pars for the levels have also been sent packing - in the original game, you had a par number, which set a target for the number of items you should be able to summon before you solve a puzzle. This has been taken out, as they decided they did the opposite of what they had originally intended, as it made people limit the amount of stuff they summoned - and therefore limited the amount of creativity and craziness that followed.
At Gamescom, we were treated to a sneak peak at some of the levels, to give you an idea of what's in store. One puzzle level in Super Scribblenauts involves Maxwell working at a garage, where customers are bringing their cars in to be painted. A hint says that customers often wear their favourite colour, so the bride gets a white limo, red riding hood gets a red sports car (the wolf can't catch her now), the goth girl gets a black bus, the hippie gets a green, er, hippie van and the policeman gets a blue SUV.
In another level, there was a mad scientist who was hoping to turn a man into a dragon - in Super Scribblenauts, you can make potions with adjectives (eg. a hungry potion) to transfer the adjective to the person. Therefore, we can feed the man a green potion, a scaly potion and a winged potion, et voila, you've got an, er, slightly scaly green man with angels wings - which didn't look too much like a dragon to us, but the mad scientist certainly seemed satisfied, and gladly rewarded us with a starite.
These are perfect examples of the sort of puzzles Scribblenauts throws at you - levels that make you think, and encourage you to replay them to see how many different ways you can solve it, but also something that's perfect for both kids and adults, as it just oozes fun. It's also the perfect game for adults and children to play together, as even if the children aren't that good at spelling, with a parent leading with, "Well, here's red riding hood - what colour should her car be?", it can really help push their creativity.
One of the most entertaining parts of the original game - especially for younger children - was the playground. It appeared right at the beginning, on the title screen, before you pressed start, and in it you could summon whatever you wanted, to just generally muck about, without the confines of a level. It was the perfect place to find out who would win in a fight between God and a ninja, or to build a tower of perfectly stacked TVs, or have Maxwell run around in a top hat with a radio glued to the top - the possibilities were endless. The one disappointment was that things wouldn't stay there once you left - in Super Scribblenauts, they do, so you can play with your ninjas, TVs and radio hats another day.
Who needs an ipod, when you can have a radio top hat?
It was in this playground, we got to play. After we'd created several craters with exploding keyboard cats (for those who don't know, keyboard cat has become something of an internet sensation - you can find a sample of his early work here), we managed to make a tower of as many rideable objects as we could - including a zombie, fat man, and a baby deer, all balanced precariously on top of a rideable, walking computer. And we can tell you this - with no movable limbs, computers walk rather erratically, with the entire tower wobbling so much it ended up parallel to the floor on several occasions. Whilst we wet ourselves laughing.So if you're looking forward to Super Scribblenauts as much as we are, stay tuned for more information as we get closer to October, when it's out in the UK. And in the mean time, brush up on your adjectives - you're going to need them.
