Super Scribblenauts

Yesterday I ended up going on a road trip to Bob's Clam Hut in Kittery Maine to celebrate Jill's half birthday and to get some good old fashioned winter clams and scallops (they were delicious). On the way I had the opportunity to put the last couple hours worth of effort into this glorious second try in the Scribblenauts series. The initial game, Scribblenauts, had an amazing amount of potential that didn't, in my opinion, translate well into their final product. The idea that you could type in any item and the game would, in almost every single case, make that item for you and it would have the right characteristics and attributes and it would interact with other items correctly is a magical idea and I hope it becomes the basis for many many games to come. The first game was hard to control, as you had to drag the stylus in front of the main character Maxwell to get him to move. This movement style often ended with me accidentally forcing Maxwell to jump into water or other hazardous situations. Super Scribblenauts rectified this problem by changing the movement to the D-pad, giving the user much better control over Maxwell. The other major change that I appreciated from the first game is that Maxwell and his controller were forced to use a lot more thinking to solve puzzles in this game. In the first game a lot of the puzzles were simply commands to take one item from here to there and usually ended up with me summoning a helicopter and a tow rope to get the job done. This was not the case in this game, most levels included two items and a command to create a medium version of it. For example you would be shown a bird and a monkey and you would have to make a feathered monkey or a hairy bird. Or you would have to use a machine called the "createatron" in which you would be told to make an object by placing its parts in the machine, the superhero required clothing, an identity and a source of super powers (mask, person, bat) (cape, girl, arch nemesis). With the addition of adjectives the possibilities in this game are truly endless. Unlike its predecessor I was able to post this game because it was fun, enthralling, mind engaging and it's movements didn't upset me ( if I accidentally made Maxwell walk to his death one more time while trying to type in an item I was going to throw my DS at a wall). Needless to say I truly hope there is a third game to this series and I hope that, like the adjective addition, it comes with a new and better playing dynamic.