Review: Picross DS

While the Japanese have had their hands on Picross since the Super Famicom days, America finally gets its taste of the one-of-a-kind puzzler on the Nintendo DS. In a summer of exclusively casual first-party games for the Nintendo DS, Picross DS stands above all as the title to own.

For the uninitiated, Picross DS plays out like a blend of sudoku and minesweeper. The game is played on a grid of varying size, and each column and row has a series of numbers that denote the number of consecutive squares/spaces that are to be filled. For example, in a row of five, the numbers “3 1″ can only mean three consecutive dots followed by a single space and another dot. However, on a row of ten, it’s impossible to tell where the dots go and how many spaces are before and after each number group without some extra help.

Your extra help comes in the form of what I’ll call “bum” squares. Not only can you place dots in spaces where you know they belong, but you can also place bum squares at each point that you know they don’t. Eventually the placement of dots and bum squares will allow you to reason out the placement of more dots and bum squares until you’ve solved the puzzle. Each solved puzzle forms a picture which, if you finished in under an hour, animates. Though I have yet to encounter a puzzle that takes as long as an hour, your time is penalized by any mistakes you make in the normal scoring mode.

Picross DS comes with a variety of modes including daily play and ad hoc/wi-fi multiplayer competitions where you try to solve puzzles the fastest. You can even design your own puzzles and upload via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. In the future, new Picross puzzles should be made available via the service from Nintendo, but to date none have appeared. Believe me, I’ve been checking.

The graphics are only serviceable in Picross DS, but this clearly isn’t designed to be a visually stunning game. The music can also be a bit grating with only three tunes that you can manually switch among, but the soundtrack adds very little to this game and can be disabled altogether. I do personally enjoy the “slapping” sound of laying down dots in a row and dread the mistake squeak, though.

This game’s biggest flaw is that despite being a DS game, larger puzzles cannot be played comfortably with the stylus. Not only is the zoom system pretty unusable as it is, but even 10×10 and 5×5 grids suffer from inaccuracy in touch screen recognition. Since the game already penalizes you for mistakes, having the game make a mistake on your behalf because it thought you were touching an adjacent square gets old very quickly. No number of touch screen calibrations fixed this problem, and though another reviewer claimed to experience the same problem, he didn’t note it in his review because he thought it was just his DS. If that is the case, there may be some systemic problem with touch screen recognition because my friends and I have had the same issue. Stick with the control pad and face buttons on this game.

Where Picross really shines, however, is its ability to stimulate your reasoning skills. Though earlier puzzles always have some explicit “no option but this one” areas of the grid that make it easy to proceed, later puzzles will have you straining to find the little bit of logic you’ve overlooked that will allow you to proceed. You could always just guess and take the time penalty if you’re wrong, but guessing is never necessary to solve puzzles. In fact, if you guess when you should be using your brain, shame on you.

All in all, Picross DS is a must-have game for anyone that enjoys mind-bending puzzles in five- to thirty-minute increments. The minimalist, slick presentation makes it non-threatening to casual gamers, and the sheer number of puzzles included will keep you busy for weeks — longer if more puzzles finally begin to appear on the Nintendo WFC. But be careful, Picross is addicting!

We Liked:
tons of puzzles
inclusion of daily play
ability to share puzzles and compete online

We Didn’t Like:
shoddy touch recognition
small selection of music

OVERALL SCORE: 6 / 7
That’s right, we’re on a 7-point scale on WiiDS!

New Contributor Introduction: Andy

I am one of the new contributors that Torrey mentioned, so I’ll give a quick introduction.

My name is Andy Bates, and I’ve been gaming since 1977, when my brother told me to ask for an Atari 2600 for Christmas. I had no idea what it was, but I trusted him, and we got our Atari. I played console games until the Crash of ’83. At the time, it really was a huge crash. I mean, why spend all this money on console games, when there were computer games available that were much more complex? I actually remember talking with a friend in 1985, and he asked me what I thought of the new Nintendo console that was coming out. My response was, “Too little, too late.

”Besides playing a few games at a friend’s house, I completely missed the NES. The only SNES game I played was Super Mario World at a friend’s place in college. I got a Genesis late in the game, and spent some time with that, but back then video games were still seen as a fringe activity. And then the PlayStation came out. After my wife rented one for my birthday one year (we had some guys over), I eventually got a PSX of my own. Finally, games were becoming more mainstream, and I ended up on the PS2 bandwagon. But at that point, I still hadn’t owned a Nintendo console.

The system that finally got me into Nintendo was the Game Boy Advance SP. At some point, I got over the stigma of playing portable games in public, and realized that there was this completely untapped system just waiting for me to try it out. I was also really fascinated with WarioWare for some reason. So I picked up the SP, and suddenly there was this huge backlog of classic Nintendo games that I wanted to try. Thanks to the SP, I played through all of the classic Super Mario Bros. games that I had never finished, from the original all the way through to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.

It was all downhill from there. I ended up getting a $99 GameCube with Christmas money one year, and again, since I got it late in the cycle, I had a much better selection of really good, cheaper games to choose from. By that point, I was hooked. I picked up a bunch of used games for cheap, then the Nintendo DS, and then the Wii as a birthday present.

One other thing you should know about me is that I’m a completist. Remember all those old Nintendo games that I missed? Well, I’m going back and playing them now. For example, I just finished Metroid a few weeks ago; and The Legend of Zelda a week before that. I am trying to catch up to the present day, but there are so many good games that it’s kind of slow going. Hopefully I can share my thoughts on these classic games, albeit with a perspective of playing them twenty years too late.

Coming Out

Though the future location of this site is still in question, the Garden of WiiDS family will soon be growing. From now on, only for administrative-type posts will the “gardenofwiids” handle be used.

As new contributors join the blog, I’ll try to give a short introduction of each writer. But for now I guess I should finally introduce myself.

My name is Torrey Holbrook Walker. My first love is music, just so that’s clear. But I’ve been fascinated by interactive electronic entertainment for nearly as far as I can remember. I can recall with fondness being sent off to the arcade with a five dollar bill in-hand while my mother navigated the shopping mall. Kid Niki and Rastan were some of my most beloved babysitters.

From July 1999 until July 2001, I worked in Japan on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme. During this time I developed conversational proficiency in Japanese, and I’ve visited Japan many times since moving back to the United States. My most recent visit was to Tokyo for the Tokyo Games Show and a much needed vacation. I should be headed back there next month.

As far as gaming goes, I am very much a fan of new experiences be they proper (“hardcore”) games or otherwise. There is a certain charm to hopping on turtles and rolling giant balls to break up the monotony of get gun, get bigger gun, kill, kill, kill. Not to say that I don’t enjoy picking up a pixellated gun every now and then.

Though I certainly don’t think Nintendo has the market cornered on good gaming experiences, I like what they’re trying to do to break down the wall between the gamer and non-gamer. That’s why I started this blog.

Good to meet you.

Editor Issues

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. As you may have noticed by some of the more recent entries, I’ve tried to add an image or two to break up the monotony of reading. The problem is that the default WordPress editor is absolute garbage and corrupts every entry I write.

I now have to compose in a separate application and copy-paste entire entries. This wouldn’t be so bad if I could retrieve the exact code that I copy-pasted, but since it is mangled immediately I have to edit the original text file and copy-paste again if I make a correction.

For this reason I am heavily considering relocating this blog. I do not, however, relish the idea of trying to copy all of the old mangled entries and reformatting them so they are readable. When I’ve decided what to do on this, I’ll post an entry detailing the resolution and hopefully where I’ve moved.