Kotaku Australia update. It takes 4 Spartans to kill Death. Whoa.

Kotaku of Australia finally posted their impressions from their time with the game yesterday. Remember, these were the guys who took suggestions for items. For the most part they stuck to those words.

You can find the article here.

Some highlights:

“BFG” didn’t work. The Warner rep I was with suggested “Big Friendly Giant” instead, which did work. However I suspect it just picked up on the word “Giant”. “Chuck Norris” failed me as well since no real people are in the game.

No surprise there. Also very astute of the previewer to assume it simply picked up on "Giant", though to be honest it doesn't really matter too much if it did. I'm sure the actual BFJ is trademarked. Also, thank god we have further proof of Chuck Norris is out of the game.

“Clinical Neuropsychologist” did work, assuming your idea of a clinical neuropsychologist is an old guy with receding white hair. “Spatula”, “Penguin”, “Butter”, “Parasol” and “Black hole” all worked too. The latter sucked the penguin and neuropsychologist to their doom.

Similar to the giant above, I assume the game picked up on the key word in the name to spit out a doctor. That's actually a really great system, as I'm sure not every gamer will remember (or know of) the "rules" and might add adjectives or unnecessary words purely by force of habit. I also take offense my Penguin died in such a way!

This time I added a pirate then a monkey, both of whom were happy to wander around next to me. Next I added a ninja who immediately attacked and was killed by the pirate. The monkey picked up the ninja’s throwing star. Then I added a zombie and a robot. The zombie attacked the monkey, but lost! The surviving pirate, monkey and robot were content to exist peacefully, although the latter seem rather confused by the whole thing.

No words are needed here. Make up your own story to go along with this.

“Chewing gum” gave me a pre-chewed wad of stickiness. “Propeller hat” gave me a regular hat. Slightly disappointed, yet undeterred, I put the hat on my avatar. I then attached the chewing gum to the hat. Certain objects can be stuck on or attached to others, you see. I typed in “Propeller” and attached the propeller to the chewing gum stuck to my hat.

My avatar immediately flew into the air. Yes, Scribblenauts lets you make your own propeller hat

Bwahahaha, that's incredibly awesome. I'm surprised propeller hat isn't in the game...though it might be under the "proper" term, beanie. But even then, Scribblenauts allows you to improvise, and he was able to build a make-shift propeller hat McGyver Style. Screw par! I'm going to make awesomely complex creations like that.

Lastly, riffing on the theme of mortality, I entered “Grim Reaper” and watched as Death himself chased my avatar around the screen. Thinking quickly, I typed “Spartan” and a near-naked warrior appeared. His spear was no match for sickle, however, so I added a second then a third and then a fourth Spartan in quick succession. By the end of the battle, only one Spartan remained standing.

So, there you go, it takes an army of four Spartans to defeat death.

"There you go", indeed! I would have never thought to use Spartans to solve this situation. But though it took 300 Spartans to defeat Persia, it took only 4 to defeat death.

Alright, good stuff. We learned some pretty interesting interactions, and got confirmation we can build homemade "gadgets" if we can grab some base components. All in all? Pretty cool preview!