And so the epic DS game arrives poised to be the DS GOTY of 2009. And I got it yesterday! :D Screw you, Mario and Luigi, this is the game to be playing right now. Who can resist a game where you can summon anything just by typing it in? And I do really mean everything, from tanks to seashells to owls to God and beyond.

You start with the title screen, a free-for-all playground where you can do anything, no puzzles, just one environment and your imagination. So go ahead, don't open a save file, cause the title screen is already a game in itself :P Alright, so the title screen does get old after a while with no goal to aim for.

The game's main stages are divided into puzzle and action stages. Main goals of both are to collect the star for each stage.The puzzle stages involve solving a problem to make a star appear, like 'help grandpa see the eye chart'. Give him a pair of glasses and the job is done. Or, give him contact lenses. Give him binoculars. Give him the eye chart itself. The sky's the limit. Action stages place the star in a hard to reach place and you're supposed to obtain it by defeating enemies, breaking obstacles and such. Hence there's less avenue for creativity here than in the puzzle stages(how do you get to a high platform? Wings, grappling hook, jetpack, trampoline...the same things for each stage).

After about 3 hours messing around, you get a feeling for how the game limits you. Firstly, most two word phrases don't give you the correct item if you don't type it in properly. For example you want a can of spray to kill a fly, and you type in 'bug spray'. A can of spray paint pops out, which is wrong. Type in 'insect spray', and you've done it right. The trick the game uses is, if the first word doesn't make sense, use the item meant by the second word typed in. Strangely enough, the game can place items four words long on the stage, like 'large cracked wood platform'. How the hell you are supposed to imagine those out is beyond me, though it's not impossible to type them out.

The creativity aspect probably outweighs whatever flaws I'm going to point out after this, but I'm just gonna go ahead and point them out anyway. They're small things that you just can't ignore. Mainly, the awkward controls. Point at a certain area of the screen, and Maxwell(the main character) moves over to it. If there's a small obstacle in the way, Maxwell will try to jump over it, if he can't, he's stuck in a mad jumping frenzy until you point elsewhere. If you mistakenly click outside of an item when you meant to move it, Maxwell will move instead, and will create a lot of problems, like getting himself hurt. His position is always quite precarious.

Number two is the physics of the game. Everything weighs about the same, and things that aren't supposed to be heavy are unmovable, things that are supposed to be breakable are not. Try to chain a dog to a tractor and try to move the vehicle. It'll only move little by little while the dog just sits there. Tie a wrecking ball to an enemy whose near a cliff and nothing will happen to him, he doesn't get dragged down to oblivion. Throw a bowling ball at a stack of glass bottles, they'l just fall over and don't break. The only way you can break them is by explosives and guns.

Complaints aside, Scribblenauts is still an ambitious and exceptionally unique DS game that tests your creativity and dexterity in puzzle solving by giving you every item under the sun to do so. And even with the huge pool of useable things, it's still a commendably challenging game. Quite simply, a masterpiece.