Jandy’s Meanderings

I was trolling around the internet yesterday looking for a puzzle game I used to play a few years ago. I have no idea why this game popped into my head yesterday, but I got a huge craving to play it again, only I couldn’t remember what it was called or where it was, only that it was a big grid with numbered colors out to the top and side, and you had to put the right number of colored blocks in the right spaces, and you’d end up with a picture. Googled, searched my usual game haunts (though I knew it wasn’t one of the big ones like Yahoo!Games or Shockwave or Uproar–I was just hoping they’d have something similar to help job my memory). Nothing. Found lots of Sudoku! But not what I was looking for. Finally I gave up, intending to eventually e-mail the friend who had introduced me to it in the first place if I didn’t remember it myself within a few days.

Then today I got a new Game Informer magazine, and I casually flipped through the reviews (BTW, they gave Bioshock a 10! I’ve never seen them give a 10…I might have to add it to my list of games to check out once I get an Xbox360), and kept going past the Xbox listings into the handheld reviews–which I don’t always do, since I don’t hold a handheld system. AND THERE WAS THE GAME!! Nintendo released it as “Picross” for the DS; apparently there was a Picross version on the Game Boy back in the ’90s as well. I knew I hadn’t known it as Picross, but looking at the pictures it was absolutely the same idea. Googled “Picross,” found a reference to “Nonogram” on Wikipedia, which apparently is the general term for these type of games. And they listed “griddler” as an alternate name, AND THAT WAS MY GAME! Wow. It’s so incredibly weird that I would suddenly think of that game yesterday after not having played it in probably two years, and that it would happen to coincide with the release of a similar DS game and that I would actually read the DS reviews in the Game Informer this week.

So, anyway. If you’ve got time to kill (and I warn you, these puzzles are addicting), check out Griddlers.net. The site is a bit confusing at first–I recommend creating an account first thing so it’ll save your progress on any puzzles you can’t finish in one sitting–but the puzzles are a lot of fun. I didn’t realize there was a whole group of games like this…if you don’t like the Griddlers site, you can google “nonogram” or “picross” and find similar games on other sites.

Posted in gaming |
Tagged:griddlers, websites