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Never, in any of Scribblenauts Remix's 50-odd stages, will you need to spawn a giant rainbow
beaver. Or a shy, fire-breathing, winged hamster. Or Tom Jones, riding a tiny helicopter made
of ice.
If you really want to, of course, you can spawn any of those things. Or all of those
things, and watch what happens when they collide.
This bonkers DS import lets you type just about any word - as long as its not copyrighted,
vulgar, or massively obscure - into a text box and watch it magic into existence.
Developer 5th Cell evidently devoured dictionaries and Wikipedia lists, making tiny 2D facsimiles
of just about every noun in existence - from bacon to badger - and they all come complete
with individual attributes and personalities. You can add adjectives, too, to ensure that
your dinghy is red or your bridge is sopping wet.
Scribblenauts gives you free rein to try out these impossible creations and implausible
deathmatches in its sandbox title screen. This creative extracurricular start menu imposes
no rules or boundaries, and lets you find out exactly who would in a fight between God
and Cthulhu. It lets you truly test the depths of its dictionary, and lets you put a hat
on a giraffe.
Sadly, such a staggering database of things is resolutely squandered in the game's lifeless
series of braindead challenges. What use is the ability to create a royal rumble starring
a tyrannosaurus rex and a zombified monkey when your task is to type in five objects
that would probably be in a town.
It's preschool stuff, and often illogical, as you painfully prod words into the text
box until you finally stumble on the exact handful of nouns that the level designer was
dreaming up when he made the stage in question. The levels are crushingly uninspiring, painfully
cryptic, and, more often than not, just plain dumb.
Every now and again the game gives you a more suitable challenge - cross shark infested
waters, deliver treasure to a pirate, cause the extinction of the dinosaurs without weapons
or asteroids - and it's here that your imagination can be tapped.
It's not about finding the right tool for the job - it's about magicking in the first
object you think of and seeing if it will work. It's about being outlandish, abstract,
and creative.
You could drop a toaster into the sea to electrocute the sharks, or unleash a prehistoric ichthyosaur
to gobble up the over-sized guppies. You can lasso the treasure and transport it on a UFO,
or tie it to a balloon and ferry it across with a fan on a giant stepladder.
You can unleash a matter-sucking blackhole to do in the dinos, or take your cue from
the bible and spawn in God to sort them all out.
It's in these stages that Scribblenauts lets you exploit your rarely-used childlike imagination
to solve puzzles in pointlessly time-consuming, but workable, ways. But those moments are
few and far between.
Remix nabs 40 stages from DS original Scribblenauts and its so-called Super sequel, but for some
reason it takes more of the dull, cryptic puzzle levels from the latter and fewer of
the action stages from the former. The iOS-exclusive stages don't inspire much awe, either.
It also drops one of the best ideas from the first games, where you could replay levels
but were banned from using the same words as before.
To get those bonus points you couldn't rely on easy tools like ropes, ladders, and helicopters
- you were truly forced to think outside the box. That entire system has gone. It's down
to you to challenge your own creativity, this time.
Thankfully, another less attractive feature of Scribblenauts is absent: its dodgy controls.
Thanks to some streamlined ideas, the larger screens of the iPhone and iPad, and an overall
revamp of the way chicken-headed protagonist Maxwell moves, you'll spend far less time
accidentally swanning off into a pool of lava.
But, despite being given a third stab at the concept, the well-meaning creator has just
never solved Scribblenauts's most basic hurdle. How can you give a player an unlimited resource
of things and bits and bobs and doodads and narwhals and whales, while creating levels
that stretch the imagination without veering off into illogical word-hunting?
It leaves Scribblenauts Remix in much the same state it was in on DS: an unimaginably
cool gimmick that's well worth the price of admission - especially at its budget App Store
price - just to see what it's capable of. Or to watch a monkey drive a truck. But the
game can't offer challenges that inspire you to delve into its bursting thingiverse.
Oh, and the time machine doesn't work. What's up with that?