Having run short of new Picross games to play *cough Western gamers should really have been allowed access to Club Nintendo Picross and Club Nintendo Picross Plus cough* I turned to the past to satisfy my burning desire for picture crossword puzzles. Jupiter’s very first offering in their long-running series (now 23 strong by my count) is a barebones affair, mostly 15x15 puzzles on a tiny monochrome screen.
I say monochrome; of course, playing on a Super Game Boy or GBC will give a few different shades and highlighted interface elements. As usual, it’s Nintendo’s Virtual Console features that are barebones, but that’s how I played it for convenience. Pixel-perfect mode is unusable—I’d need opera glasses to read the numbers on that tiny rendered display. Blown-up mode is a little fuzzy but serviceable. With those boring technical details out of the way, let’s talk about the boring game details.
The game has a light pseudo-archeological theme as presented via Mario’s constant pith-helmeted visage, the cursor being in the shape of a hammer and chisel, and the nice puzzle menu backgrounds. There’s 3 screens of 64 puzzles each, which kept me going for 15 hours. All the modern conveniences I was used to—numbers automatically greying themselves out, easily crossing lines, colour—were absent, but it actually didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. I’ve gotten proficient enough at internalising the logic tricks that I looked past primitive control concerns, I suppose. The puzzles are also simpler in shape than the weirdly shaded and detailed representations these days; if anything recognising the chunky, basic outline of a dog, for example, made these more satisfying a lot of the time.
That’s not to say that this very old iteration is preferred. There’s no way to view completed pictures once you return to the menu. The outdated time system, while never actually threatening to end any of my attempts, adds an unnecessary element of tension. Free mode is only unlocked after completing everything, and then strangely it just gives you a random puzzle each time from the whole selection. And solving puzzles with buttons is still inferior when stylus-driven games are available, especially when the D-pad decides to be a tad unresponsive. Besides, it just doesn’t have the smooth pizazz Jupiter later pulled off. The core concept is great, and appears here almost fully formed… it just needs more room to breathe than the old Game Boy can allow it. I did make some Miiverse posts about the Mario-themed puzzles but I can’t get any more specific than this link, and there’s only 8 of them.
