I... I don't know if I get it. Which is , because I totally got 100% completion in Brain Age Sudoku..
All the numbers mean, is that SOMEWHERE, in that row/column, there is a block of pixels N long, right? and no other pixels appear in that row anywhere?
And that's all the information you get, right?
edit: ooooooohhhh shiiiiit, it's in order! christ, why didn't you say so!
edit: Got it. Did the first two. Pretty cool. Definitely not as addictive as Sudoku, though. The logic is less "logical", and more searching for patterns, so the "chase" isn't as intense. Still kickass though..
I got very very addicted to Picross on my old Palm Pilot. The screen protector has a perfect grid drawn into it from the hundreds and thousands of games played.
I usually play these at http://www.puzzle-nonograms.com/. You can just right click the mouse to x out a square instead of the shift click. Unfortunately the pictures there are usually just random blobs. There's also other puzzle games at that site too (Loops are addicting.)
I usually play these at http://www.puzzle-nonograms.com/. You can just right click the mouse to x out a square instead of the shift click. Unfortunately the pictures there are usually just random blobs. There's also other puzzle games at that site too (Loops are addicting.)
The (apparently dead) Puzzle Japan link I posted was a site very similar to this with many of the same types of puzzles. I me some Light Up and Bridges, although it looks like Nurikabe isn't available. I keep getting stupid menu pop-ups whenever I right-click, however, which is seriously turning me off.
-Puzzle creator (with wi-fi and online sharing)
-Online multiplay speed competitions
-Regular weekly download packs of extra puzzles from old versions!
-Daily brain training-esque mode with graphs and such
I've been playing the Japanese version of Mario Picross. Excellent game.
I've known about Picross before I knew Sudoku but I don't think I would've been able to understand Picross if I didn't play so much sudoku. Definately my new favorite puzzle addiction.
InitialDK on
"I'd happily trade your life for knowledge of my powers."
-Louis C.K.
I've been playing the Japanese version of Mario Picross. Excellent game.
I've known about Picross before I knew Sudoku but I don't think I would've been able to understand Picross if I didn't play so much sudoku. Definately my new favorite puzzle addiction.
Man, remember the sudoku solver programming challenge? I wonder if we'd be able to do another one for a Picross solver ...
Which reviews a lot of (mostly japanese) puzzle games. Written by Rev Stu a veteran of uk reviewing - and huge puzzle fan.
He says this of the japanese version of Nintendo's Picross - which I figure is the one released here
PICROSS DS (Nintendo)
Unusually, given the company's long history of excellent Picross titles, Nintendo's own take on Picross on the DS is a ham-fisted effort. Absolutely swamped in Japanese menus (with the occasional inexplicable English "Level 1" or somesuch), it's a chore to find your way to any actual puzzles, and when you do you're forced to use a pointlessly complicated touchscreen-and-d-pad control system that makes the process of playing awkward and obstructive - it's almost impossible to concentrate on the puzzles because you're too busy thinking about the controls. Much worse than the basic control system, though, is the display layout. For puzzles larger than 10x10, you're forced to use a scrolling screen, also controlled unintuitively with the stylus, which is so mindbogglingly horrible and contrary to the entire principle of Picross (which is about cross-referencing information from the entire grid to make the logical deductions) that it effectively renders the larger grids unplayable. This is a dreadful mess, and it's hard to imagine what Nintendo were thinking of. 2/10
Oh no! - Hang on - just read the review you posted. I'm putting the 2/10 down to translation issues. This version looks much different - and much better! If it's £20 I'll pre-order (I set myself a budget now)
And give Essential Soduku this:
ESSENTIAL SUDOKU (D3 Publisher)
It's Sudoku! It's Picross! It's Sudoku and Picross! It's, er, Essential Sudoku. This is a weird and schizophrenic little release, which is just about the cheapest DS game you can buy in Her Majesty's Great Britain. (The RRP is £15, but you can pick it up from most online retailers for under a tenner). Despite the title, the cart's content is focussed equally on Sudoku and Picross puzzles (there are 1,000 of each), and the Picross element (or "Picture Puzzle" as it's called here) actually gets given precedence in the game itself. The Sudoku (or "Number Puzzle") half is hampered by some truly terrible handwriting recognition code which is utterly incapable of correctly identifying a "5" more than one time in 50 no matter how you draw it, but luckily you can enter numbers with the d-pad and "A" button instead and enjoy some perfectly adequate Sudoku antics.
The Picross puzzles are far more interesting, though. Uniquely among the DS' Picross titles, these are the more complex multi-colour type of nonograms, with slightly different rules (squares of different colours can be adjacent without a blank space in between, but consecutive blocks of the same colour still have to be separated). The need to select colours makes the interface rather more fiddly than in Illust Logic (the stylus isn't quite precise enough, and the d-pad/button controls could have been better thought out), and the front end is crudely minimalist but such minor quibbles are a small price to pay for such a huge collection of excellent Picrosses. In both games the puzzles are arranged into groups of 100, so you'll have to be stuck on 10 different puzzles before you're stymied, and there's a vast amount of head-scratching fun here for your money. In terms of hours of entertainment per pound, this is probably the best-value DS game ever released in the UK. 9/10
I like essential Soduku - but it's production values are so low its shocking.
He also mentions Slitherlink a puzzle game similar to picross
It's beautifully constructed (save for an irritating and useless one-time tutorial that you should manage to bypass after some desperate random button-mashing), with an understated elegance that's surprisingly beautiful to behold - obviously, it doesn't look much in static screenshots - as the little rainbow that signifies an unbroken line glides its way around the grid reassuringly. Beyond the tutorial the Japanese text presents no obstacle whatsoever, and there are both stylus and (superior) d-pad controls, along with a convenient array of tools (like dotted lines for bits you're not yet 100% sure about). It'll take you scores of hours, maybe hundreds, to exhaust the 270 puzzles supplied, longer yet to get perfect ratings on all of them and collect all the stars, and even when you've beaten the entire thing you'll have long forgotten how you did the earlier puzzles, so you can just delete your save game and start again. And for sheer time-evaporating pleasure, accompanied by an effectively infinite lifespan (and because unlike Magnetica it doesn't come perilously close to undoing all its good work with fucking blowing-into-the-mic levels), Slither Link deserves a perfect score. Not only the best DS puzzle game, but arguably the best DS game full stop. Glorious. 10/10
- and convinced eurogamer to review it - and give their first ever 10/10 too. Worth looking into especially with the play-asia sale.
I never played picross before, and now I'm hooked, dammit. I'm stuck on 6, though, the first five were pretty easy. 6 doesn't have any '15' or '0' rows, oh noes!
I never played picross before, and now I'm hooked, dammit. I'm stuck on 6, though, the first five were pretty easy. 6 doesn't have any '15' or '0' rows, oh noes!
A tip (don't click if you absolutely NEED to figure it out on your own) :
Since the grid is 15x15, you can fill in at least half for anything over 10. For example, a row of 10 will always take up the middle block. A row of 11 will always take up the middle block and at least one on either side, and so forth.
I never played picross before, and now I'm hooked, dammit. I'm stuck on 6, though, the first five were pretty easy. 6 doesn't have any '15' or '0' rows, oh noes!
A tip (don't click if you absolutely NEED to figure it out on your own) :
Since the grid is 15x15, you can fill in at least half for anything over 10. For example, a row of 10 will always take up the middle block. A row of 11 will always take up the middle block and at least one on either side, and so forth.
That can help get you started on number 6.
I actually just figured that out and was coming here to post it. Thanks though, for the help. I skipped on to 7, and it just dawned on me, I'm going back to 6 now.
EDIT:
You can actually do this for any number above 8. 9 will have to involve the middle 3 squares, 8 the middle square.
Yes. It was Java-pain-tastic. But in principle it's pretty good.
I should update the OP when I have a moment. This thread seems to have a bit more staying power than I expected. And now theirs the new Nintendo DS Picross gaming coming out as well that seems very exciting. Wi-fi? wow.
Wii post olol
Anyhow, I got started on a fun little programming project this afternoon... Sudoku for the Wii browser. http://mpierce.pie2k.com/wii_sudoku.php ... No real features yet but it'll give you an idea for how I wanted to do the remote interface. In the end it'll probably work like Brain Age with 3 strikes and it's game over.
Wii posting as well.com Thats brilliantly done. how long did it take you?
lol
Only took an afternoon to get it to its current state... once I got home and was able to test on a Wii I realized I had to fix some CSS, but beyond that it was working fine.
It probably won't take more than another few hours of work to complete, but out of respect for my girlfriend I don't program on the weekends.
To be done:
* clean up the design a little
* add 3-strikes-and-game-over logic (half done ... the javascript can solve the puzzle on load and detect a wrong answer ... just need to have it track how many you got wrong)
* write a routine to generate puzzles. This might turn out being pretty hard to generate a puzzle in a timely fashion.
I'm loving the Picross mode on Essential Sudoku as well, even though the touch screen input can be somehwat inaccurate at times which is annoying but not unmanageable.
I am thoroughly less impressed with the actual Sudoku mode though, no mater what I do it keeps interpreting a 5 as an 8 so I can never actually even finish a level! So I'll stick with Brain Age for Sudoku and just play Picross on ES.
Oh no! - Hang on - just read the review you posted. I'm putting the 2/10 down to translation issues. This version looks much different - and much better! If it's £20 I'll pre-order (I set myself a budget now)
Picross DS is super awesome. I've been playing it for a few months, because I love picross. The problems the guy mentions are valid though - the japanese menus are difficult to navigate/understand until you just remember which option does which mode, also the touch-screen control option is just awful. On larger puzzles it zooms in where you click, despite that you can see the entire grid when it starts, and you have to hold down different directions on the d-pad in order to select whether you want to fill in a space or put down an x. However! Using the other control method (d-pad and buttons) is much easier and doesn't have zooming around so you can't see one side of the puzzle when you're working on the other. English menus will make this a superb title. I'm already through most of the puzzles on the Japanese version so I'm pumped about the Euro release.
I think I botched Puzzle 8 right near the end, anybody want to spoiler post an image of it completed so I don't have to start over?
It's not like we were keeping a catalog of images of solutions. You don't want to start over, but for one of us to get an image of the solution, we have to start over. :P
Posts
Now I can only get 5 hours of sleep... assuming that I stop this madness right now.
All the numbers mean, is that SOMEWHERE, in that row/column, there is a block of pixels N long, right? and no other pixels appear in that row anywhere?
And that's all the information you get, right?
edit: ooooooohhhh shiiiiit, it's in order! christ, why didn't you say so!
edit: Got it. Did the first two. Pretty cool. Definitely not as addictive as Sudoku, though. The logic is less "logical", and more searching for patterns, so the "chase" isn't as intense. Still kickass though..
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
The (apparently dead) Puzzle Japan link I posted was a site very similar to this with many of the same types of puzzles. I
Okay I've been doing some rearch and it's pretty damn packed with content!
http://www.cubed3.com/review/463/
-Puzzle creator (with wi-fi and online sharing)
-Online multiplay speed competitions
-Regular weekly download packs of extra puzzles from old versions!
-Daily brain training-esque mode with graphs and such
I may be needing to make a purchase V soon...
http://www.nintendo-europe.com/NOE/en/GB/news/article.do?elementId=43IruQ2C0y0ZNyE-yi_oOUtuENnykhzN
"Picross DS launches across Europe on May 11!"
I've been doing them at griddlers.net, and it's been taking me about twice as long as the "average time" to solve just one.
3DS: 1607-3034-6970
I've known about Picross before I knew Sudoku but I don't think I would've been able to understand Picross if I didn't play so much sudoku. Definately my new favorite puzzle addiction.
-Louis C.K.
Its probably a very good thing that gridders.net is blocked at my work.
I am a freaking nerd.
Man, remember the sudoku solver programming challenge? I wonder if we'd be able to do another one for a Picross solver ...
http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/dsrev/roundup3.htm
Which reviews a lot of (mostly japanese) puzzle games. Written by Rev Stu a veteran of uk reviewing - and huge puzzle fan.
He says this of the japanese version of Nintendo's Picross - which I figure is the one released here
Oh no!
And give Essential Soduku this:
I like essential Soduku - but it's production values are so low its shocking.
He also mentions Slitherlink a puzzle game similar to picross
- and convinced eurogamer to review it - and give their first ever 10/10 too. Worth looking into especially with the play-asia sale.
Scholar and a Gentleman? Critical of bad science and religion? Skeptobot - Is for you!!
That can help get you started on number 6.
3DS: 1607-3034-6970
This could well be amazing.
Scholar and a Gentleman? Critical of bad science and religion? Skeptobot - Is for you!!
I actually just figured that out and was coming here to post it. Thanks though, for the help. I skipped on to 7, and it just dawned on me, I'm going back to 6 now.
EDIT:
As for slitherlink: http://www.vgreality.com/alphaex/flashloader.php?f=flash/slither_demo_v13c.swf&w=430&h=510&n=Slither%20Link
Yes. It was Java-pain-tastic. But in principle it's pretty good.
I should update the OP when I have a moment. This thread seems to have a bit more staying power than I expected. And now theirs the new Nintendo DS Picross gaming coming out as well that seems very exciting. Wi-fi? wow.
Scholar and a Gentleman? Critical of bad science and religion? Skeptobot - Is for you!!
Anyhow, I got started on a fun little programming project this afternoon... Sudoku for the Wii browser. http://mpierce.pie2k.com/wii_sudoku.php ... No real features yet but it'll give you an idea for how I wanted to do the remote interface. In the end it'll probably work like Brain Age with 3 strikes and it's game over.
Scholar and a Gentleman? Critical of bad science and religion? Skeptobot - Is for you!!
lol
Only took an afternoon to get it to its current state... once I got home and was able to test on a Wii I realized I had to fix some CSS, but beyond that it was working fine.
It probably won't take more than another few hours of work to complete, but out of respect for my girlfriend I don't program on the weekends.
To be done:
* clean up the design a little
* add 3-strikes-and-game-over logic (half done ... the javascript can solve the puzzle on load and detect a wrong answer ... just need to have it track how many you got wrong)
* write a routine to generate puzzles. This might turn out being pretty hard to generate a puzzle in a timely fashion.
I am thoroughly less impressed with the actual Sudoku mode though, no mater what I do it keeps interpreting a 5 as an 8 so I can never actually even finish a level! So I'll stick with Brain Age for Sudoku and just play Picross on ES.
Picross DS is super awesome. I've been playing it for a few months, because I love picross. The problems the guy mentions are valid though - the japanese menus are difficult to navigate/understand until you just remember which option does which mode, also the touch-screen control option is just awful. On larger puzzles it zooms in where you click, despite that you can see the entire grid when it starts, and you have to hold down different directions on the d-pad in order to select whether you want to fill in a space or put down an x. However! Using the other control method (d-pad and buttons) is much easier and doesn't have zooming around so you can't see one side of the puzzle when you're working on the other. English menus will make this a superb title. I'm already through most of the puzzles on the Japanese version so I'm pumped about the Euro release.
And by "Fuck you" I mean Thank you.
-Louis C.K.
It's not like we were keeping a catalog of images of solutions. You don't want to start over, but for one of us to get an image of the solution, we have to start over. :P
Battle.net: Fireflash#1425
Steam Friend code: 45386507
I think it has something like 350 puzzles, plus downloadable ones. Should keep me occupied for a while.