Picross 3D

I totally forgot I had this blog. Well, I didn't forget, but I briefly moved it to its own domain which I pretty much stopped updating after a few months, then let expire. Those posts are very likely lost to the Internet monster, although I'm sure something somewhere has them. I may try to recover them and post them here. Maybe not.

At any rate, I find it kind of interesting that my last update here (almost three years ago!) was for Picross DS, a game I'm not sure I ever finished all the puzzles in. I should check that out. Still, I love the concept, and if there's more to solve, I'm all for it. But why is that neat? Because one of my more recent purchases was, as the title would suggest, Picross 3D, also for the DS. For Picross 3D, Nintendo took the basic color-by-number idea of Picross and stuck it on 3D objects. Rather than coloring squares, you're essentially carving an object out of a rectangular prism. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun. My biggest complaint is somewhat of a big one, actually. Because the numbers used in the game are on the puzzle itself rather than surrounding it, they chose to use circles and squares around those numbers to note when those pieces are not connected. A circle for one space, and a square for two or more. For instance, a circled five means there's two portions of some combination, while squaring that five means there could be anywhere from three to five parts totally five squares in that row. It seems easy, but with the DS's somewhat limited resolution, it can be difficult to tell which is which from an angle, which leads to errors, which leads to a less than perfect score, and perfect scores are necessary to unlocking all the puzzles.

At this point, I've completed the vast majority of the included puzzles, but have a few more to unlock, but Nintendo is already releasing new puzzle sets for download, with six packs of five puzzles available last I checked. Despite its minor flaws, I would heartily recommend this to anyone looking for a cheap puzzle game that will provide hours of playtime and more in the future.