Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Scribblenauts, an iPad Game that Lets You Design It As You Play

Scribblenauts, an iPad Game that Lets You Design It As You Play sounds pretty interesting.

"You control a cute manga-esque avatar named Maxwell, who has the genie-like ability to conjure up almost anything you can dream up--all you have to do is type in a description of it. The tutorial starts you off easy by suggesting things like "ladder" or "box" (for climbing to reach Starites, the floating talismans Maxwell needs to collect in order to advance to the next level). But why stick with that when you can just as easily ask for "a giant blue dragon"? (Beware: he's not exactly well-mannered.)

As long as it's not a swear word, proper noun, or copyrighted product, Scribblenauts will interpret your every whim and make it part of the gameplay. You can use these creations to solve challenges, or simply inhabit a "playground" level and experiment on your own. The latter was more appealing to me, but it took my atrophied adult brain a while to get into the swing of things. I asked for a "huge spinning cube" and got a homely little wooden crate. Then I realized I should stop thinking of useless visual abstractions and channel my inner eight-year-old. Within seconds I had Maxwell flying around in a jetpack blasting things with a machine gun, and I had much more fun. (Hm, what would've happened if I asked for a "huge" machine gun instead...?)"

1 comment:

Karl said...

Sound interesting, but I can't help think back to my early days of computer gaming with adventure which had a text parser which would let you do anything - as long as the program was coded to let you do it. Of course that really amounted to a very small set of things and endless frustration (which actually *was* expected since it had some cute programmed responses).