Anything Maxwell writes in his notebook becomes real-it's like Death Note, but not about a sociopathic misfit murdering anyoneВ who slights him. You control a kid named Maxwell (or his vast array of siblings) who carries a magical notebook.

Scribblenauts has a simple but frankly brilliant premise. These days, Minecraft seems to have cornered the market on creative play, and Scribblenauts has a style and vibe all its own. Both games in the Mega Pack collection have a sort of low-key, stress-free, as-you-like-it approach to play, placing their emphasis on creative word-based solutions to puzzles. Again, thisВ seriesВ traces its origins back to the DS, and it really shows. None of those consoles lack for a library of releases, yet none of them have anything quite like Scribblenauts. That makes the Mega Pack's arrival on current platforms-Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4-all the more remarkable. The DS may have been doing fairly well for itself as recently as seven or eight years ago, but that epoch of gaming somehow seems as bygone as the PlayStation 2. That core audience was siphoned up by smartphone gaming, causingВ console and handheld games to retreatВ back to their usual themes and formats once that generation of Nintendo hardware (and hollow attempts to imitate it, like PS Move and Kinect) faded away. The fertile, anything-goes frontier days of Nintendo DS and Wii resulted in a great many genuinely clever ideas for games designed around alternate interfaces and aimed at all ages, and that's something we really don't see any more. It's a relic of an era in gaming that has completely vanished. (That's as many asВ one-half 10s.В And that's terrible.) Even the Scribblenauts franchise itself hasn't quite hit the decade mark, the original having debuted back in 2009.Д«e that as it may, Scribblenauts at least feels older, in a spiritual sense. As a collection of Scribblenauts Unlimited and Scribblenauts Unmasked, the Mega Pack contains material that originally shippedВ as recently as five years ago. I suppose WB Games' Scribblenauts Mega Pack doesn't really qualify for coverage here on Retronauts, as we prefer to focus on things that are at least 10 years old.

Mission control for retronauts former EIC of 1UP.com and taking dapper (and frogs) back from the Nazis.

Scribblenauts unmasked ds