Mario's Picross

Mario's Picross is a 1995 game I've long considered buying, so I was thrilled when it appeared as one of the latest Club Nintendo 3DS download games. Alright, "thrilled" is a stretch, but this is seriously something I've had my eye on for several years. I've even had the 3DS version in my Amazon cart once or twice before, but never could quite pull the trigger on the puzzle game.

First, just what is Picross? It's a collection of nonograms - also apparently known as "griddlers" and "paint by number" puzzles - which are grid-based puzzle games not unlike sudoku or crosswords. Check them out on Wikipedia if you've got even the slightest interest; it's much easier to see them than to try to glean an understanding from them based on a verbal description. All in all, there are 256 puzzles in the game. The first 192 are broken into three sets of 64 each, increasing pretty linearly in difficulty from the immediately solvable to the truly complex. Then it appears that the final 64 puzzles are just time trial versions of previous puzzles. In this time trial mode, the game won't tell you when you've made a mistake and won't give you one row and column for free at the beginning of the game, as had been the case in the first 192 puzzles. For this reason, I considered these final 64 puzzles some sort of bonus challenge mode, and can safely call the game beaten. It was a decent little distraction, and something it was easy to play in front of the TV, but as I'm sure you can imagine it grew repetitious and monotonous as hell. I found myself falling fast asleep doing the puzzles in bed by the end of the game. Hey, whatever. Onward to bigger and better games now.