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Friday, 18 October 2013

Finally laying to rest a huge series of puzzling puzzles


Been playing this game on and off for a number of years now, but finally decided to make the push to finish it recently.

Picross, or Nonogram as it is more commonly known is a puzzle game where you are given a grid and each row and column shows you the number of blocks that need to be marked in on that grid and how many consecutive blocks together there are. Sounds like a simple concept, but as with most simple concepts, mastering it is another matter entirely.

Solving some of the larger grid puzzles can get very hard and involve some serious tactical and deterministic thinking. And the odd guess every now and then. Naturally when playing this game in a paper as they are often published, you are not told of the mistakes you are making but in the electronic versions, you are. Each mistake deducts time from you and when you run out, you fail the puzzle. This is the normal mode. However, the electronic versions of Picross also feature a harder mode similar to the paper version where you are not told your mistakes so the numbers can be right, but the puzzle itself is not right.

I first got hooked on Picross by first playing the awesome Mario's Picross back on the original Game Boy. I was instantly hooked on the satisfaction of chipping away tiles and revealing a picture. I then went on to play the Japanese only Mario's Picross 2, this game and the awesomely intense Picross 3D. This was definitely the longest of all of them (with 165 puzzles in the normal mode alone) hence me only finally finishing it now. But I enjoyed every minute of it and hope there will be more Picross in the future.

Side note: this marks the 139th game finished this year. Officially surpassing last year's 2012 game total of 138. Go 2013! And there's still 2 and a half months left in this year to finish more games. Let's see what we can do with that.

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