GBAtemp book game club's edition 65 is the order of the day. The feature otherwise known as GBAtemp book game club forms one of a couple around here that we have that aims to highlight games worth having played but unlike some of the others where one of the staff of a guest reviewer will review a game this is more about those reading and participating in the club.
The GBA, DS and Wii will be the main sources of selections with the occasional dalliance with a console that the DS can run be our sources for most of this but on occasion we will stray from those and we will also try to note versions and previous entries on other systems. Those original three consoles have huge libraries of homebrew code, commercial game releases, examples of leaked beta code as well as increasing numbers of hacked titles.
The selection process itself will remain shrouded in mystery but our intention is not to have a glorified top games list as those have been done many times elsewhere and some of the games history might not remember so well have tried some interesting things or came from interesting circumstances. The end result of a selection process will typically be a single game but multiple related games in a franchise or theme might be the selection (possibly for a compare and contrast but not always) and certain games have interesting challenges/runs people have cooked up (sometimes even going so far as to hack the ROM to facilitate it) so they can feature as well.
#65 - Scribblenauts (NDS)
5th Cell, the developers of Scribblenauts, did not have a great deal going for them (even if they did make previous game of the week title Lock's quest) coming into this with a handful of mobile phone games to their name and the somewhat enjoyable Drawn to life which in some ways was the opposite of Scribblenauts. The premise was one that sounded like it was the result of an overeager new coder brainstorming session that had not yet had the good grace to collapse under the demands of such a project; what if the player was given the powers of a skilled computer user in a film/TV show and could summon whatever/whomever to aid in their task? With games usually being based around restricting the player and many notable styles of games such as text adventure and point and click adventure being at once some of the more open styles of game and some of the most annoyingly restrictive this was a big ask of any developer.
They actually managed to pull it off though with a dictionary big enough that most people did not feel too many restrictions and despite some questionable rope physics and character controls (should one have to try to put it in a genre puzzle platformer would probably be it) they made what probably should have been a tech demo into one of the more endearing games on the DS.
There was a further sequel on the DS that added adjectives and the game has been ported to IOS as well as a presently a sequel for the home consoles being in the works. In the spirit of the challenges/runs part that is part of the intro and seldom part of the selection itself try not to use the jetpack all the time. Anyway did 5th Cell manage to pull off the near impossible or is it just an illusion?
gbagotw should get you other links in this series