A few weeks ago, espion4ge talked about Borderlands being his potential sleeper hit of the year, so I thought I’d share mine as well. Scribblenauts is a game that got a huge amount of press at E3 - it seemingly came out of nowhere and was essentially the best in show.
Scribblenauts is essentially a puzzle game: your job is to help your character reach a certain goal (usually getting a star or something). To help your character get there, you have to write a word to give the guy an item to help him get the star. The crazy thing is, there are over 5000 words in the game’s “dictionary”, so almost anything you can think of goes! The trailer pretty much speaks for itself, but the cool thing is some of the things you drop into the game world interact with your character.
For example, if you write in “zombie”, the zombie will kill everything on the screen. You can also write in really random things, and a lot of them show up in the world as well, as you can see from the trailer. The developers basically had 4 people sit in a room for 3 months combing through the dictionary and brainstorming pop culture words as well. It’s like almost everything you can think of that is rated PG goes.
This game not only has the potential to be super cool, but also could be a little bit of a game-changer for the industry in general if it does well. It’s a puzzle game that puts a lot of power in the hands of the player, which could (hopefully) lead to some intriguing gameplay down the line. Hopefully this game lives up to its potential…early returns on preview builds are pretty good, so I’m optimistic!
This reminded me of an article I found related to street fighter:
http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2009/jul/12/street-fighter-scribblenauts-styled-artwork/