Scribblenauts? More like scribble not.

Above: Exploring scribbles.

I have a review of Scribblenauts up at thephoenix.com. Innovative or not, it is not a very good game. It's fun to mess around with, and my wife wants me to tell everyone that she really liked it. (That's not as minor a footnote as it may sound -- this may be the first time that's ever happened. You wouldn't believe the number of supposedly casual-friendly Wii games she hasn't liked. The list of games she likes now stands at two: this, and Rock Band.) But there's little more here than promise that a later game might be better.

I find I'm losing patience with games that don't work well to begin with. Everybody made so much out of how everything you summon in Scribblenauts acts correctly -- bears are hungry, helicopters fly, and so on -- but I found that not to be the case. Things rarely did what I expected them to. Maxwell hardly ever went where I wanted him to. And perfectly logical solutions didn't pan out, because the governing logic naturally can't be all that different from one type of thing to another.

There was a time when I'd put up with a game's foibles, because it was the only one I had on hand, and what the hell else was I supposed to do? These days I feel more like I can't be bothered with a game that hasn't put in the effort to smooth out the edges. I love the idea of Scribblenauts. I really do. I also love the idea of world peace. Sometimes you bump up against reality.

Friday afternoon tidbits

I'm looking forward to playing the new Left 4 Dead campaign tonight. I also intend to play more Dead Space: Extraction this weekend, after being pleasantly surprised by the first two chapters. Will report back!

-A while back, I posted a list of songs I'd like to see in Rock Band. In that post, I predicted a zero-percent chance of one of those songs ever being released. Shows what I know: "Gay Bar" by Electric Six will be released as DLC next Tuesday. This is very exciting. And it's also another reason why I'll take the open Rock Band platform over the more hermetic Beatles installment. You're just not gonna get surprises like this from the Beatles game.

-In this week's Experience Points podcast, Jorge and Scott talk about downer endings in games, or, more specifically, a lack of them (inspired by Manveer's post on the subject). I think the issue really isn't one of "happy" or "sad" endings, it's one of thoughtful, mature endings that carry a character's arc through to a conclusion, or that contain elements of both happiness and sadness. I mentioned The Darkness in comments as a game that gets it right. The final sequence is viewable on YouTube, although I'm not sure it would make much sense if you hadn't played the rest of the game. The point is that it provokes conflicting emotions, while completing the protagonist's fall. It's brilliant.

-At Press Pause to Reflect, C.T. Hutt weighs in on something that's one of my pet peeves: overly helpful helper characters. Navi is the worst, and Issun clearly wasn't much better. Having an NPC partner isn't inherently a bad idea -- it's been done well in Half-Life 2, for example. It's when the partner is overbearing and impossible to ignore that you get into trouble. How hard would it have been to have to ask Navi for hints when you wanted them? Or better still, design the game in such a way that her particular brand of help isn't needed? Just more reasons why Ocarina is the Most Overrated Game of All Time.

-This one's a little older, but I didn't do a links post last week so I'll write it now. Michael Abbott wondered whether we praise innovation at the expense of execution, specifically talking about the difference in critical buzz between Scribblenauts and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. I recall that last year Leigh Alexander observed an opposite problem -- that we condemn innovation when the execution isn't quite there. They can't both be right, and I'd venture to say that it's not so simple as either of those formulations makes it seem.

Innovation is useful for a great many things, but it is not the endpoint. It's the beginning. Gaming history is littered with examples of games that innovated and failed, but whose ideas were subsequently improved upon. In his next post, Michael praised the value of iteration, which is a point I fully agree with. But if you trace these refinements back far enough, you'll eventually get to something that was brand-new, and which didn't work as well. You can't really separate innovation and execution.

As for why so many writers in the brainysphere are talking about Scribblenauts, it might be as simple as this: it's a game about words. We're the target audience!