Friday 23 May 2008

Picross puzzles have been around for quite a while now. I remember trying to do them when I was young in some logic puzzle book or newspaper. In most papers or books they’re called Nonograms (after one of their creators, Non Ishida) and have been around since the 80’s. Nintendo’s name for them is better since it’s far more descriptive – Picture Crosswords are not quite what the puzzles are, but the name does at least give you a good idea of what you’re in for. On paper the puzzles never grabbed me, mainly due to the need to erase errors making this a little difficult when you rubbed a hole through the newspaper, but on the DS it works like a charm – if you’re one for puzzles this is all the game you need for a good many months.

Starting off easy

The game starts you off at a gentle pace with 5x5 puzzles. You are given a grid, and the idea is to fill in certain blocks and mark others as empty based on the clues you are given. The clues are simply numbers that indicate how many blocks on a line are filled in. For example, if a row has the clue (3, 1) next to it, you can immediately fill in the first three blocks, leave a gap of one and fill in the next one to make five. A clue like (1, 1, 1) also fully describes a row or column of 5 blocks. The harder part comes in when the clue only gives you a small indication of what is filled in, like (1, 1), meaning at some point in the row one block is filled in, followed by a gap of some length, followed by a filled in block. Without other clues you’ll never solve that one, but that’s where the Cross bit comes in. You’ve got clues next to each row and next to each column, and they feed into each other so that pretty soon you’re able to fill in all the correct blocks and reveal a picture (this is where the Pic comes in).

Picross DS may start you off easy, but it does get progressively more difficult as you finish more puzzles, and pretty soon you progress on to 10x10 puzzles, then 15x15, 20x20 and finally 25x20. In Normal Mode, if you try to fill in a block that shouldn’t be filled in you will be bleeped at and a time penalty will be added – the more mistakes you’ve made the bigger the time penalty. The idea is to finish all the puzzles within an hour each (with penalties included – the puzzles take far less than an hour to finish) in order to unlock some bonus puzzles with a particularly Nintendo-ish theme. The reward for finishing a puzzle is both the monochrome picture you have uncovered and a little colour animation of it.

Free mode, where the real challenge lies

After you’ve finished off Normal Mode, the next step is Free Mode, where the game lets you make mistakes without correcting you, much like those newspaper puzzles, except now you can erase without destroying the puzzle. They have cleverly put in a “try it out” mode which allows you to save the state of your puzzle and try a certain block out as filled (or unfilled) and see if it leads to a contradiction down the line (where one clue says a block should be filled and another says it shouldn’t). If this happens you can simply pop back to the state of the puzzle before you went down the errant path – another feature that just isn’t available in your friendly neighbourhood newsagent’s rack of puzzle books. The third feature is the use of a D-pad and buttons – yes you can use the stylus to do stuff, and in fact after I got used to it I preferred it, but when travelling, or when you just couldn’t be bothered to write, the D-pad works impressively well.

But what next, what happens after you’ve finished the massive number of puzzles in Normal and Free mode? Well, first you deserve a medal for that, and the game happily rewards you with yet more puzzles to solve! But when you’ve finished those there’s still more you can get by connecting to the internet with the Nintendo WiFi Connection. You can even make your own puzzles along with a little colour animation, should you be artistically minded, and upload them for others to try out. Then there’s also the Daily Picross mode, a set of five mini-games that hone your speed and test your Picross solving abilities with randomly generated puzzles to solve in various ways such as using your memory or finding the errors in a puzzle. I enjoyed doing my daily Picross, and did it most days of the week for a few months, trying to get A ranks in all the mini-games, since all it took was 5 minutes a day. The game happily graphs your progress, but you’ll find you quickly peak and thereafter your times depend more on the luck of the draw in terms of puzzle difficulty, and perhaps a little on the state of your brain.

The power of the internet

Other than a vast amount of content, the main thing of importance in a game like this is the interface. For the most part Jupiter has got it right. Unfortunately the big puzzles don’t fit on the bottom screen and you have to scroll around the puzzle. To solve this, you can switch from using the stylus to using the D-pad and buttons, in which case the whole puzzle will show at once. I guess this zooming in was to facilitate the use of the stylus as the blocks in zoomed out mode are too small to accurately choose in stylus mode. All told, the D-pad mode is probably the stronger mode, but it just feels right to be using my pen to do a puzzle, so I stuck with stylus mode, just scrolling around happily when I needed to. Fortunately, selecting whether to fill in a block or blank it out is as easy as holding down A or B and tapping the block. Filling in a range of blocks just requires you to swipe your stylus along while holding down one of the buttons. With no buttons pressed the puzzles scrolls around. Meanwhile the top screen always displays the entire puzzle if you really want to see the overview.

Picross DS is a simple, straightforward puzzle game based on a fairly mature concept, but its interface, options and sheer volume of puzzles (as well as the limitless possibilities of the Internet) means that it is a must-have title for puzzle game fans. Of course, those who balk at Sudoku or crossword puzzles should remain wary as always, and maybe try out a pen and paper version before choosing this to while away idle hours instead of Mario Kart.

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Contributor:	Peter

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