Scribblenauts Unlimited features HD visuals on the Wii U and integrates quite well with the controller, allowing the player the same sort of precision touch control via the controller screen as we saw with the earlier DS versions, but leveraging the much more abundant real estate of the HDTV screen. It’s a wonderful combination as it’s easy to swap back to select what you want or type in a word (or phrase) and then resume play on the main screen.
Unlimited features dozens of different areas, all of which are much larger than they were in the original game (they aren’t simply levels; instead, they’re more like large community areas where you can pick and choose people to help). You can easily see who needs help on the screen by tapping a Star icon in the upper left-hand corner. This highlights everyone who wants something done, and you can easily tap a person to choose them and see what it is they’re longing for.
At this point, you can either create items directly on the spot using a keyboard on the Wii U screen and then drag them to where you’d like them in play, or you can go a little further with the customization.
Meaning…? Well, Scribblenauts featured tons of nouns, nearly all of which produced some sort of interactive sprite on the screen when invoked. Super Scribblenauts added adjectives to the mix, enabling you to create much more specific things and modify existing objects. Scribblenauts Unlimited, meanwhile, just says the heck with it, go ahead and create whatever you want.
Whenever you like, you can pull up an editor and create a new object. You can alter or add pretty much anything you can dream up. For instance, I witnessed a nature tank that shot hippies. Yes, that happened. I decided also to try and create a black hole gun—you know, a gun that shoots black holes. Granted, it makes no freaking sense, as black holes suck everything into themselves with inescapable force, but I figured I might as well give it a shot anyway. Unfortunately, my creation ultimately didn’t function precisely as I had anticipated as I actually integrated a black hole into the gun, which, as you might expect, sucked everyone into the gun instead. I had intended to modify it but I shortly thereafter managed to freeze the demo (it’s beta, of course) and thus the dev console on which it was running had to be rebooted.
But you can make it work; at least, I think you can. The creation interface is seriously robust. There is a tab for sizing, coloring, textures, rotation, and all sorts of stuff. Naturally you can attach items to other items. But you can even pull up a scripting tab which includes a plethora of ridiculously in-depth functions related to how the object you’re creating is meant to behave under particular circumstances. There are even IF … THEN statements you can leverage to make this work as you intend. Or, in my case, there was a simply option for what the object does (“shoots”), and then what object it shoots (“black holes”). You can even define damage, whether or not it sets things on fire, and all sorts of other stuff too. Sweet.
This game seriously has me intrigued. If I’m near the booth tomorrow I plan to return and try some other stuff I think up while writing tonight. This game truly looks like it’s made for the Wii U!