By Dave
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I seem to have a bit of a soft spot when it comes to puzzle games. There’s just something about a puzzle games that, when perfected, is just completely addictive and impossible to put down. It happened last year with my Tetris addiction, that lasted about 3 months. I literally could not stop picking up my DS; every spare moment I had, I worked on perfecting my block spatial awareness, increasing my block rotation speed and associating the different coloured blocks to the others and how they would best fit together. If I ate cheese before going to bed, I would have strange cheese dreams about Tetris blocks invading my home and trying to crush my family. I was addicted, and there was nothing I could do about it- I had to become a Tetris master.
And I became a Tetris master. Now, every time I pick up Tetris, I can perfectly match all the shapes together. I never fail. I could literally keep going forever.
I eventually weaned myself off it’s beauty, and for a while, I was fine. I was a perfectly adjusted member of society. I went out drinking with friends, talked about interesting topics and could almost converse with girls in a normal manner.
Unfortunately, now Picross has now come along, and it threatens to ruin my life all over again. In Picross, the aim of the game is to make a picture on the grid given to you through placing blue blocks on certain bits in accordance to numbers lined up on the sides of the grid.
Now, the way I’ve just described it makes Picross sound like some kind of retarded maths quiz that your teacher used to force upon you when giving you a rest from proper work, or for a ‘Christmas treat’. But refrain from accusing me of being a boring maths nerd who enjoys logic puzzles for a minute. Picross rocks. Or at least it rocks in the same way that Belle and Sebastian rock. Picross is not a cool game- it doesn’t have the flashy graphics of the big consoles or the amazingly awesome main character that everyone wants to look like, but it does have a simple charm. It’s laid out to you simply, and in an uncluttered way. It just gives you lots of puzzley goodness.
And that’s all it needs to give you. It realises that all you want is the puzzles, and that’s all it does. It gives lots and lots of puzzles. It even gives you an option for you to design your own puzzles and send them to people via WiFi. And oh, what lovely, wonderful, brain taxing and fun puzzles it gives, like Gary Kasparov setting you chess task after chess task, but making it fun by giving you sweets whilst you play.
And now, I want to master the art of Picross. I want to be able to work out every puzzle in the shortest time possible and look at all the funny little block pictures I create, then laugh as they don’t really look like anything. Goodbye life, hello Picross.
