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Scribblenauts was highly touted at E3 as the most original and groundbreaking game ever made, so my expectations were high for this title. Boy, was I a sucker. Perhaps I was duped because 5th Cell, the developer behind THQ’s Drawn to Life, developed this game. But on the flip side, WBIE, not THQ, was the publisher. I know I do not share the same opinion of this title as the rest of the gaming press does, but let me plead my case.

You know when you go to The Sharper Image and you buy the clock that projects the time on your entire wall because your neck wasn’t made to turn toward your nightstand and look at the actual clock? Then you get home and you realize your bedroom is lit up brighter than Times Square and you didn’t need this stupid clock anyway because your old one worked just fine. Scribblenauts is both an ingenious and ambitious concept. Your goal is to collect the “starite” in each level, and you do this by summoning your vocabulary spirit to introduce objects to your environment that will aid you in solving the puzzles. If I needed to grab an object from a tree, I could write in “ax” and then use that ax to chop down the tree. Relax. It wasn’t a real tree. They’re only pixels.

Hey, review girl! Scribblenauts sounds amazing and I’m currently headed to my local video game store to trade in 12 games for it. What’s your problem?

I’ll tell you what my problem is. As impressive as the rumored 20,000+ lexicon is (I didn’t attempt to validate the rumor with my own tests), the controls are frustratingly imperfect. One may even call the controls flawed. That’s awesome that I typed in “baseball” and a baseball actually appeared, but I didn’t want it to hit an innocent bystander in the head. After all, when you spend the manufacturer’s suggested retail price on a game, you expect the very core of the game (aka the controls) to work. Scribblenauts also struck a nerve when I started the game and I saw paper suns hanging by string in the environments. Really? Did you go for the 2D Little Big Planet vibe to be cute?

Something else bothered me even more deeply than mechanical flaws. We have established the fact that there are thousands of words you can use in this game, so here is my question to the Warner Brothers and LEVEL-5 organizations. Why the eff did you choose to name your currency “ollars” and the stars each level is challenging you to obtain “starites”? Maybe the localization team is to blame, but I think they could have come up with better words than those.

I was once like you, excited to get my hands on this game and throw some crazy words and scenarios out there. But the novelty wore off quickly and the controls tried my patience more than rush hour traffic. The concept was impressive, but the end product failed to meet my expectations. This game only scored this high because of the expansive word bank.