Nintendo's Crossword Miracle

Jun. 10 10:02 PM by Alicia Ashby

Every time I work on a big console guide project something stays welded into my DS to play for "decompression" purposes. Usually it's a light RPG of some kind, occasionally an action game. For the past month, it's been... Crosswords DS. Yeah, look, I don't know.

There's not much music or graphic pizazz to this game; you hold the DS in "book" format and write letters into the puzzle to solve it, just as if you were doing a crossword on paper.The cart holds at least 650 puzzles in crossword mode alone, ranging from easy to hard. Your easy puzzles can be solved in less than five minutes, most of the time, while hard puzzles usually take around 20 minutes. The varying difficulty levels ensure basically anyone can play the game, and the clues are pretty good. All told you get a better value-per-puzzle from Crosswords DS's $20 cart than you would buying 600 puzzles worth of crossword collections at your average supermarket.

Why the hell do I care so much about this game? Why can't I stop playing it? I don't ordinarily like crossword puzzles all that much. They remind me too much of that weird grandma's house smell, old newsprint and Endust.

I do tend to like the various novel uses of the DS you see in the Touch Generations line, from your basic Brain Age to stuff like Puzzle Planet League. I think that may be the attraction with Crosswords DS. Software that can recognize handwriting is by itself kinda cool, and using it to solve word puzzles sits better with me than Brain Age's more math-based puzzles.

More to the point: the ability to write things directly "into" the game to solve puzzles is really novel, when you think about the history of gaming. The DS is a system that actually has quite a few crossword puzzle games available for it, including the New York Times Crosswords and USA Today Crossword Challenge. It's also the first game system in history to play host to multiple successful crossword titles.

(There are a lot of mobile Crossword titles, but I have yet to uncover any evidence that suggests they're any good.)

What you have in Crosswords DS is a small, quiet, and largely unsung case of system technology pushing forward innovations in gameplay. Crossword puzzles themselves are nearly a century old, and yet it's only now that technology has advanced to the point where functions of simple paper and pencil can be successfully emulated. (Even then, Crosswords DS occasionally decides that G you just wrote is actually an I.)

Video games have developed a long way since Pong and early wacky arcade cabinets, and usually talk of gaming technology improvements focuses almost entirely on display and audio advances. It's when you realize that your $600 console is incapable of letting you play games that generally just require pens and cheap newsprint that you start thinking about what has actually advanced. It looks like input technology really is the next gaming frontier.