A playthrough of Nintendo's 1995 puzzle game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Mario's Picross. This video is the first part of a two-part playthrough. Part two shows all of the puzzles from the Star Course ( ). The game is being played on SNES through the Super Game Boy. Time stamps: How to play 0:31 Easy Picross 2:39 Picross, Kinoko Course 2:43:40 Mario's Picross was one of those rare Nintendo-published games that was met with indifference and terrible sales everywhere but Japan. It seems that not even the mighty Mario could rescue this one. "Picross" is the term that Nintendo likes to use to refer to nonograms. Nonograms are a type of logic puzzle that were popular in Japan in the late 80s/early 90s and were often found in newspapers, and they have that "easy to learn, hard to master" quality that all good puzzle games seem to possess. Picross puzzles are presented on (typically square-shaped) grids of square cells, and solving one usually reveals some sort of hidden image. Flanking the top and the left sides of the grid are sets of numbers that indicate how many squares in the row or column should be filled in. Each number represents a grouping of consecutively filled squares, and there must be at least one empty square separating each grouping. For example, if you were to see "2 5" at the left, you would know that you would need to fill in a group of two blocks followed by a group of five blocks in that row, and that they'd be separated by at least one empty block. That's about it for rules, but as you might imagine, the solutions are rarely as simple as the rules make it sound. Mario's Picross was among first nonogram-based video games to be released, and it was the first by Nintendo, developed by Ape (the guys who did Mother/Earthbound) and Jupiter (the guys that seem to exist solely to make Picross games for Nintendo). Though reviewers tended to criticize the limited scope of the game's puzzles (the puzzle grids in Mario's Picross range in size from 5x5 to 15x15, while those in published in books, magazines, and newspapers were often many times larger), the puzzles in Mario's Picross are perfect for anyone who isn't already familiar with the game. The cart offers an excellent tutorial mode and its puzzles are grouped and ordered by their relative complexity and difficulty, so the game doesn't throw you into the deep end without a paddle. The difficulty curve is nicely balanced, and some of those later puzzles will force you to flex your brain in ways that I found pretty satisfying. There are also *a ton* of puzzles on offer here, so if you dig the mechanics, you'll get a lot of mileage out of this one. Granted, Mario only seems to be here as a marketing vehicle. His face is always in the corner of the screen and there are a few puzzles based on imagery from the Mushroom Kingdom, sure, but they feel like they're included only as a way to sell the game to the masses. It doesn't feel anything like a Mario game, but once it has its hooks in you, I doubt you'll care. The gameplay is addicting in ways most games can only dream of being. _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete ( punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
