So, once Brooke got her netbook, I promptly installed Plants vs Zombies for her to play on it, a game developed by Popcap that involves defending your house against an onslaught of zombies. You use plants (like “peashooters”…that shoot peas at the oncoming zombies…or “wallnuts”…that are just giant wallnuts that serve as walls to help…just watch the video to get an idea, eh?) as defensive measures to prevent the zombie horde from eating your brains. Brooke has been addicted to it since I installed it on her netbook, so after she completes it, I’ve been trying to think of the next thing to keep her occupied.
Well, this week was E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in Los Angeles, where all of the upcoming gaming announcements come out for the coming year…or, at least, damn near all of them… One game that came out of it is for the Nintendo DS, called Scribblenauts. Joystiq had a blurb about their hands-on with the game and the thing sounds absolutely awesome. Basically, you play the game as Maxwell and you have to get him from point A to point B, depending on how each of 220 levels is set up. As their article describes, you could have Maxwell in a desert and you need to get his thirst quenched, or you could get him across a shark-infested pool to the other side. The catch is that you have to write things down on the DS touch screen to help him out. So, as Joystiq describes, in the case of the desert, you could write water and some water will appear. Or, to be more creative, you could give him an oasis.
This is one snippet from Joystiq’s description of their time with the game:
“Ludwig was tasked with navigating [Maxwell] through a zombie apocalypse to reach a helicopter with his brains in tact. He attempted to hold the undead off with a wall, but he couldn’t get build it fast enough to hold off the horde. He whipped out a shotgun, but their numbers were too large to dispatch with a firearm. Naturally, his next instinct was to craft a time machine, which took him into the prehistoric ages. Of course, he was surrounded by unfriendly dinos, so he made a robot dinosaur, which he then mounted and used to destroy his scaly adversaries.”
Apparently, nearly everyone at the show was trying to “break the game” by coming up with as crazy a noun as they could, only to find that the game had a seemingly limitless dictionary.
So yeah, maybe this will fit the bill? Sounds pretty creative to me, certainly…
Edit: Joystiq posted another article with ten words they put in and what the responses from the game were. The only one that wasn’t recognized was “plumbob,” while others like “stanchion” and “lutefisk” came up fine. Craziness!!
…and it will be mine soon! Thanks 
