Helicopter + Chain + Cage + Baby + Volcano = Most creative game of 2009.
This game has an amazingly wide vocabulary with over 10,000 words. Scribblenauts is not simply just going to your notebook and creating things; it's also building contraptions and combining things. Have you ever wanted to have a flying unicycle? No? Well, now you can! The only down-side to this is that they missed a lot of simple things like different sorts of weapons and just turned them into other weapons. For instance, typing in different types of rifles comes out as the same rifle. Other than that, there are lots of neat Easter Eggs such as typing in "teleporter" to get to the 5th Cell's in-game head-quarters. Also, if you activate a nuke and then go in the teleporter, you go to another planet.
For a DS game, the graphics are still pretty awful, and I feel that Scribblenauts 2 needs a desperate graphics update to surpass Scribblenauts. The game's frame-rate lags constantly when there are lots of items on the screen, and it even froze on me about 5 times.
The camera is kind of annoying sometimes, as you normally have to fix it yourself, but I didn't really get angry with it ever. That's because I was too busy getting mad at the horrid controls. I don't remember how many times the controls made me lose a mission because I tapped the notepad and Maxwell (the protagonist) moves instead of the notepad opening up and kills himself. Another annoying thing is the terrible friendly AI. In one of the missions, they deliberately killed themselves by hitting themselves on ships when escaping from an under-water base, and the game also auto-jumps for you when you come across an item, which is kind of annoying sometimes.
There are plenty of missions in the campaign, and it should take you anywhere from 7-14 hours to beat all 220 levels, depending on how creative you are. I was quite disappointed with the end puzzle, which had the hint, "Write the answer!" I took one look at it and wrote "The answer," in my notebook and beat the level. The action level, however, was very clever. I won't tell you how it's done, but it'll make you laugh after you spend so long trying to beat it and figure out it wasn't hard at all.
I love the constant memes in this game, like the Giant Enemy Crab that attacks you in one mission, or the Ceiling Cat reference in another. Also, there's a certain cheat that you can do when you type in Rickroll, so that's an Easter Egg as well as a meme reference.
The Level-Editor is a neat addition, though I didn't explore it in-depth enough to say much about it.
Overall, Scribblenauts has a lot of faults, but for an original game, I feel that it did very darn well.
The Good: Lengthy campaign, level-editor, fun menu, lots of items, Maxwell is really cool.
The Bad: Often frame-rate drops, glitchy, bad camera, unintelligent friendly AI.
Final Rating: 7.5/10