Publisher: Warner Bros. Games Developer: 5th Cell Price: $60
If you can think of it, you can summon it in Scribblenauts Unlimited. The fourth game in the series, Unlimited marks the franchise’s first appearance on home consoles. You play as Max, or any one of his over 40 siblings — yes, his parents kept very busy — and help solve people’s problems. At its heart, Unlimited is a puzzle game. You do this by pulling out his magic notebook and typing into it. An orphan in the hospital needed help calming down for the impending zombie apocalypse. What did I do? I summoned a bottle of morphine, of course: it worked like a charm. Each task completed nets you a gold star and there’s any number of tasks per level -- some hidden, others more obvious.
What sets the Wii U version apart from its two handheld and one mobile predecessors are Nintendo characters and the object editor. As a general rule, Scribblenauts doesn’t allow for proper nouns or vulgarity but developer 5th Cell added all manner of Mario’s friends. One task required me to knock a decrepit building down; instead of summoning a bulldozer I summoned Bowser. He didn’t do anything until I summoned Mario. Once Mario appeared, Bowser started breathing fire and the building was ablaze. Problem solved.
It was little moments like that where the only thing that stood in my way of earning a gold star was my creativity. It took a bit to train my brain to think and solve puzzles differently, but once I started summoning Cthulu to do all my bidding, I had fewer problems. . . maybe I’m kidding, maybe I’m not. It could be because I missed previous iterations of the franchise, but Scribblenauts is the game I’m playing most on my Wii U and it’s something I’m thinking about playing even when I’m not playing it.
I was on the fence about my feelings for the Wii U, but this game took away my doubts and made my purchase worth it, and I haven’t even gotten my hands dirty with the deep object editor yet.
