Scribblenauts came out in October and I ummed and ahhed over whether to buy it or not.  Knowing that Xander had nicked my DS Lite because his DS Heavy charger had gone missing, I put it off.  I wasn't really going to be able to play it anyway, so what was all the fuss about.  But something about the game chimed harmonically with my very inner being, resonating to my core and piquing my interest in a way that very few games really do in this crotchety old time of life.

So when I got an unexpected windfall of backdated payrise money, I thought, "bollocks to it, I'll buy a DSi and Scribblenauts."  Harking back to past editions of the UFO Gamers Show and Hooty's opinions of the game, I was actually a little apprehensive.  The idea that you had free reign of an entire universe of possibility took my imagination to interesting places, but I was tethered firmly to the ground by the very fact that this game is on the DS.  Whatever flights of fancy were playing out in my mind's eye were more than likely to be simply impossible due to the limitations of the platform, but actually I found the game to be quite pleasing.  Solving a puzzle in the simplest and quickest way is the main aim, but you find yourself trying to come up with more and more absurd situations with varying degrees of success and hilarity.  But as Mr McBoob rightly points out, once you find a certain amount of core objects, you tend to stick with them, since they will solve any or all problems presented to you.  I find these objects to be the black hole, generator, jetpack and wire.  With these, anything can be accomplished.

With over 200 levels, this game doesn't sell you at all short, you can play for five minutes as easily as you can play for 50; plus with a level editor and multiplayer options, Scribblenauts will keep you coming back time and again to Maxwell's crazy world of starite-seeking strangeness. 

While Scribblenauts invites you to cause pretty much anything (and occasionally, everything) to pop into existence, your player character, Maxwell is quite inept and cannot use things in certain ways that you or I would, which makes things rather more difficult and slightly frustrating.  Spawn a slave and perhaps shockingly, he just won't take instructions, let alone follow them. 

Wings and jetpacks only lend limited flight and chloroform doesn't last long enough either.  Ask for a wave machine and you just get a machine which appears to do nothing.  And objects can't be sized either.  If you want a bridge to span a gap, then the gap must be smaller than the bridge, you can't stretch the bridge to span the gap, unless you employ more than one bridge and some glue.  UFOs are annoyingly large and while on the subject of vehicles, the controls in-vehicle (and occasionally on foot) can be a bit hit-and-miss at times, which can really get on your tits (subject to availability), especially when something fatal occurs right at the end of a level and you have to go back to the start.  The camera snaps back to the character too soon as well but other than these annoyances, with its bright and colourful, engaging and taxing gameplay, sweet soundtrack and comedic touches, Scribblenauts has been just the right game to bring me back to handheld gaming.