Under the Radar: Scribblenauts

(Public service announcement: Apologies for the infrequent updates over the last week- normal, much more regular, service will resume very shortly)

After a relatively quiet start to 2009, the videogame release lists are starting to look a lot rosier- and with E3 just around the corner, there’s going to be a veritable avalanche of new software and hardware thrown in our faces- and that’s just the booth babes. We all have our favourite sources of breaking news and hands-on impression from around the web- be it Eurogamer, 1UP, Gamespot or heaven forbid, IGN- and like you, that’s where I’m going to have my eyes trained on come E3. But what about the games that are going to get smothered in the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles? That’s where No Added Sugar Comes in. Under the Radar is an occasional series that puts the most promising upcoming games under the microscope- not the likes of BioShock 2 or Final Fantasy XIII, but games that wouldn’t otherwise get much of an airing, because of any number of reasons- for example the game might come from a small scale or indie development studio, might fall victim to inadequate marketing, or simply lack a big-name licence to gain the attention of the ADHD-afflicted media.

In the first of this series, beginning right now, I’m going to cast an eye over 5th Cell’s upcoming Scribblenauts on DS.

More after the break.

It’s always nice to see a DS developer develop an original IP, and take the time to nurture it until it’s ready for release. Renegade Kid’s overlooked Dementium and Moon titles are two recent examples. 5th Cell’s first two DS titles, Drawn to Life and Lock’s Quest, are others. It’s even better when the fundamental concept of the game is so revolutionary. And Scribblenaut’s central premise is probably the most ambitious idea to ever appear on a handheld console: namely, the ability for the player to summon any object imaginable by scribbling its name on the touch screen.

Of course, by any object, I mean ‘pretty much’ any object. Smut and proper nouns are out, but that still leaves a massive amount in. To give you a sense of the scale of the depth of the game’s possibilities, writing ‘dinosaur’ on the touch screen will call up a generic dinosaur- but you can also summon individual species of dinosaur to do your bidding.

The open-ended nature of the game’s objectives is designed to get you to think creatively- if you can think it, then the game aims to let you do it. The flexibility and complexity of the game’s object system is demonstrated by the game’s creator, Jeremiah Slaczka, in a recent interview with IGN:

“Thunder clouds are pretty awesome. If Maxwell stands near a Telephone pole, the lightening will hit the pole, but if he’s holding say a spoon, the lightning will be attracted by the metal and hit Maxwell, and if Maxwell is riding a panda on a unicycle at the time, then that panda’s going be feeling it too. What’s really awesome is if it’s raining the lightning will set things on fire, but the rain will douse it out.”

This feat is accomplished, according to the game’s lead producer Matt Cox in an interview with Eurogamer, by means of a massive database which categorises objects according to various attributes and behaviours; weight, flammability, mobility, combustibility, and a bewilderingly diverse set of other characteristics. It’s a task that boggles the mind- but 5th Cell think they’ve nailed it. In fact, they’re so confident about the game that they claim that “it’s mathematically impossible to experience all the game’s content in a lifetime.” While they may be right- I mean, how many permutations can there be to explode a nuclear bomb by means of a stick of dynamite, a donkey and a dishwasher?- but frankly I’m more interested in trying to stump the game by thinking of something it hasn’t.

Scribblenauts’ ambitious do-it-yourself mechanic is actually a natural evolution of  5th Cell’s first DS game, Drawn to Life. Like Scribblenauts, Drawn to Life is a DS platformer with a stylus-based twist: rather than summoning objects, the game asked you to you draw your own character using the game’s MS Paint-like interface, as well as other environmental features to help you progress through the game’s environments.

Assuming that the item creation mechanic works as well as it should- and the team is supremely confident that it does- then the only thing that can stop Scribblenauts from being a winner is the level design. For all its charm, behind the clever drawing features, Drawn to Life was a pretty unremarkable platformer. I hope that 5th Cell are devoting as much time to variety within the levels as much as they are their gigantic database of objects.

With games this ambitious, it’s always difficult to know if it’s going to turn out to be a damp squib or a contender for game of the year. With Scribblenauts, 5th Cell have the concept, the experience, and the confidence to deliver in a big way. Let’s hope they also have the magic fairy dust to give the entire experience the polish it needs.

Even if it does fall flat on its face upon its release later in the year, Scribblenauts deserves huge praise for trying something that none of us have ever thought of.  It makes the kind of grandiose promise we don’t hear enough of from DS developers. Let’s have more of it, please.