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CONSOLE: Nintendo DS DEVELOPER: HAL Laboratory PUBLISHER (US): Nintendo
RELEASE DATE (NA): May 3, 2010 GENRE: Puzzle
// review by SoyBomb

Don't pick your nose, pic your ross!

I loves me some picross. Games like Mario's Picross have elicited a spark in my brain that very few other activities can muster. You throw picross in my face, and I will drop whatever I'm doing. Eating souvlaki? It's on the floor, staining the carpet. Listening to the best of Steely Dan? Discman is dropped. Taking care of a sick newborn? ...Ehhh, I'll set it down gently and keep it within visual range. I'm no ogre, after all! But then, it's carving time! So imagine my surprise when I discovered they made picross in 3D. That's like taking linguine and adding a side-order of a wicked guitar solo.

And I sure wasn't prepared for this sour tomato!

Let's review the rules of picross, shall we? In a typical game of picross, you're given a grid of rows and columns. Beside each row and above each column is a number, indicaative of how many squares should be filled in that particular row/column. For example, a row with a number "3" means that somewhere in that row, there will be three consecutive squares filled in, and the rest should be removed (or left be, as the case may be). Sometimes you may get more than one number, such as "1 4". That means, there will be 1 square filled, then a space (of any possible number of squares), then 4 more consecutive squares. Eventually, it all pans out and you make a pretty pixelated picture.

Picross 3D basically adds another dimension to th—oh, goodness, I've created a pun without realizing it. Now you have to keep track of not only length and width, but also depth. Numbers, formerly along the margins of the puzzle, are now marked on the blocks themselves. Two groups of blocks are indicated by a circle surrounding the number; three or more by a square.

Now here's the main problem I have with Picross 3D: the controls are rough. It is seriously uncomfortable to play. With most games, you can hold it with two hands, one for the directional pad and the other for the buttons. Picross 3D is entirely stylus-operated, so you'll need your right hand for taking care of that. Meanwhile, you're holding up the console singlehandedly with your left hand. Maybe I just have weak arms, or maybe this should be a bit more optimized. I wonder if I should whip out that 3DS stand included with Kid Icarus: Uprising to hold it.

You use the direction pad (or, if it's on a 3DS, the Circle Pad will also suffice) for determining what your stylus does. Hold it upward, and the stylus will break blocks. Hold it to the right, and you can mark ones you want to keep; you can't break marked blocks by accident. But in the heat of the moment, you CAN accidentally press the pad the wrong way and break a block you want to mark (something that happened more frequently than I thought), resulting in a mistake. I didn't want any mistakes. I wanted a "PERFECT" score for each puzzle. So I ended up restarting from scratch, a.k.a. wasting my time. That's frustrating. Of course, you can opt not to hold the pad at all, and then the stylus just helps rotate the puzzle around.


You will be tapping for months on end...

Once you successfully complete a puzzle, you'll get a rank out of 3 stars. Getting more stars unlocks additional bonus puzzles. As well, you also get to see (naturally) what the picture was supposed to be. I'll complete a puzzle and say, "Oh, it's a dog!", followed by the discovery, and then "Oh, it was Switzerland. Well, I was close."

There are, according to Nintendo, over 365 different puzzles in all. That's one for every day of the year! (And yes, at times, it feels like this game is taking as long as a year.) Since it's over 365, you can even play this in a leap year! YEAAAHHH!!! Seriously, there's a ton of content in here. But you can also create your own pixely puzzlars and share them with friends! Or... at least you could before the DS Nintendo WiFi Network was still a thing. Now it's not.

The music is cute in this one, and I'm sure the thrill of various pops, blasts, and heart-wrecking failure pooms will appeal to some nostalgic fellows. But really, the game is about graphical deciphering, so that's where the focus should be. And, quite honestly, how hard was it to draw a cube? It's a bunch of cubes together to form pictures. I doubt Picross 3D is pushing any hardware to its limits. At least the animations are cute on the finished products. But what's with that creepy yellow mascot? What IS it?! Why does it haunt us?!

Picross 3D was basically Nintendo's way of taking its popular (at least in Japan) picross genre of gaming and giving it that cubist edge. This game is great for puzzle and math enthusiasts alike, even if the controls might give the wrist muscles some serious wear and tear within minutes. I found this one in a bargain bin, and you probably can track a copy down in the same place. Why not add picross to your love list?


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