Picross DS
I recently was introduced to this type of puzzle by stumbleupon when it lead me to this page. I played around with the puzzles on the site quite a bit. The puzzles on the site are quite difficulty for me though. So, I began to look around elsewhere and see what else I can found. Almost immediately I found a reference to the japanese version of Picross DS and soon after I found that there was a european release. So, after obtaining my copy, I found a horde of the puzzles I’ve become infatuated with. Not only that, but, you can easily create your own on the DS as well as share puzzles with your friends.
There’s also an online community on the Nintendo WFC that has released several packs of puzzles on the japanese version and are slowly releasing the same packs in the european version. I presume they stagger the releases in an attempt to prolong the life of the game. I feel that the friend puzzle sharing does quite a bit to extend the life of the game myself. Puzzle creation is extremely easy, allowing you to basically draw the image and then it does a bit of guess work in designing the puzzle for you then lets you fine-tune the results.
The gameplay is very simple, like sudoku and other related puzzles, it’s extremely easy in concept, but, difficult in practice. Anyone can pick it up and play, but, it does take a bit to get decent times, and don’t expect to win on WFC if you’re making lots of wild guesses. In the game you’re presented with a grid, and each row/column of the grid is labeled with a set of numbers. Each individual indicating a group of blocks that should be filled along that row or column. When there’s multiple numbers on a row/column, it simply means there’s that many blocks, then at least one space, then the next number of blocks and so on. The game does a splendid job of teaching you how to play via the easy puzzles.
I thoroughly enjoy the game and would recommend it as a buy to anyone that enjoys puzzle games. It’ll keep you occupied for quite sometime and is worth every penny. I’ve been playing for a few days now and still haven’t seen all the puzzles there are in the game.
There’s also two gameboy games and an SNES game, “Mario’s Picross”, “Mario’s Picross II”, and “Mario’s Super Picross”, only the first was released in North America.
Unrelated to the DS game there’s an assortment of online places to play as well, popular search terms on google would be Picross, Nonogram, and Picture Logic.
- Games , Nintendo DS , Reviews
May 24th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Yep this is a great fun, simple game. Trinkit managed to get me hooked on it as well. Been solving several or more puzzles a day since I was introduced to it.