I'm going to get this out of the way first, Scribblenauts is incredibly fun. The entire gist of this puzzle/action/platform game/toy/timewaster is that you type in a word with the stylus and whatever you typed in appears, allowing Maxwell, the character you play as, to solve puzzles and collect Starites. You can make practically anything, as long as it is not a proper noun or anything worse than a PG rating. Anything from a car to a plane to a Pegasus to a zombie robot. Few games let you solve puzzles by having a mind-controlled Cthulhu kill your enemies so they do not attack you as you pilot a hot-air balloon to your goal.

The game, developed by 5th Cell and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, boasts an in-game dictionary of over 25,000 words, 220 levels, and what seems to be a near infinite amount of solutions. Not only that, but the items interact in fun and interesting ways. A vulture will eat a corpse. A vampire will stray from garlic, crosses, and holy water. A dingo will eat a baby. Angels and demons fight. And a nearby heat source will hatch an egg.

Innovative and fun, surely Scribblenauts is a must-buy, right? Not necessarily. For all the things you can write in and receive in game, a control scheme that does not handle like a dead horse connected to a car battery is not one of them. That is to say, these controls are mostly unresponsive, with unpredictable jolts of unwanted movement that will probably lead to your death. The controls are simple. Type or write words in with the stylus, then drag them into place with the stylus. L and R rotate the item, though this is rarely necessary.

However, the stylus also moves Maxwell, while the control pad and the A, B, X, and Y buttons pan the camera. What this means is that if your stylus decides for a split second that it doesn't want to be considered touching the touch screen, you've just dropped your much needed item in a pool of lava and you've walked off your safe little platform into the mouth of a chimera.

I can't think of a single reason why 5th Cell didn't make it so you had to tell the game you were ready to move Maxwell by tapping an onscreen button, much like the one that goes into a sort of identify mode to see what various objects are called, or the button that brings up your notepad/keyboard. This problem has been talked about in nearly every review I have seen, and is a problem for pretty much everyone.

As far as I can tell, portions of the game may provide minor difficulty for those who are colorblind. There are different colored buttons that operate different colored doors, but the previously mentioned identify mode kind of takes care of that, as you can take the time to see which button/door combination is labeled red and which one is green.

For deaf gamers, another problem I have not yet mentioned would be even more amplified. The game has no speech to listen to, and all instructions are text on a screen. However, sometimes sound effects are important. Quite a few times, a stage failure notice will pop on screen and unless you hear the sound of a crash or explosion off-screen, you will have even less of an idea of what happened then usual.

One thing that Scribblenauts does have going for it can be played one-handed. Well, 90% of the time it can. Rotating an item does mean holding it in place with the stylus and pressing L or R, but there are usually ways around this involving repeatedly dropping the item until it's flipped the way you want it. The camera and stylus controls have no reason to be used simultaneously, so that is also not a problem.

Moreover, for the most part, overly quick reaction time is not a problem, save for a few portions where you need to place an item relatively quickly.

Overall, would I feel right recommending this game?

Yes. Even with all its control issues, the game is incredibly fun. Even sticking around on the title screen, which is essentially Scribblenauts' sandbox mode, has provided hours of fun as I search for new and interesting terms, from various vehicles to mythological beasts to strange weapons. Undoubtedly, this relatively friendly game makes a fine edition to anyone's Nintendo DS library.