Mario’s Picross
Year: 1995
Rating: E
Time Played: 666 minutes / 11.1 hours
For as many Picross games as I’ve played, I figured I should probably go back and play the “original” picross video game, Mario’s Picross. Since most picross (or nonogram) puzzles are merely black-and-white pixelated images, it made sense to put this concept on the monochrome Game Boy. And while there’s nothing significant to write home about in this entry, I can’t help but feel that more recent iterations of picross have spoiled me when compared to the early versions of picross to hit the home console market.
Some of the charm that Mario’s Picross has comes from the artistic style of the puzzles mimicking the “Mario style” (i.e., inanimate objects with elongated eyes). Aside from these puzzles being in-theme for a Mario game, they’re still the fairly basic objects that you’d expect out of a Picross game. I’m sure they crammed as many puzzles as they could into a Game Boy cartridge, but it felt like there wasn’t a lot of content for this game compared to other games that came later. I completed all the puzzles in just over 11 hours, as compared to the dozens of hours I’ve spent on other Picross games.
I know it’s not fair to compare Mario’s Picross to its successor, Mario’s Super Picross since the SNES version has more power in its 16-bits to work with. However, considering how both games came out around the same time, it’s a little disappointing to see how limited the Game Boy version of this concept is when the superior version is clearly on the SNES. Even small animations or secret levels would have given this game a little more to recommend it. Heck, even some puzzles with higher difficulty would have been nice. Instead, it’s about 11 hours of the same kinds of puzzles with only minimal difficulty increases for each of the different modes.
A solid start for Picross video games that was immediately overshadowed by its successors, I give Mario’s Picross 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
