Hands-on with Crosswords DS
Put down your newspaper and pick up your handheld
Tucked away in a back corner of Nintendo's Media Summit in San Francisco last week, Crosswords DS garnered little attention. Like a sniffling nerd with horn-rimmed glasses, the wordy puzzler repelled any interest. Pushing up our glasses and spending a bit of time with it, however, we uncovered a surprisingly enjoyable game.
Crosswords DS consists of three individual word games: Crosswords (obviously), Word Search, and Anagrams. Each are played with your DS turned on one of its sides, dependent of course on whether you're left- or right-handed. For each game, the top screen (which is now to your left, if you're right-handed) displays a list of words or clues. Using the stylus to write, you can find those words and solve clues on the touchscreen.
When tackling a crossword puzzle, a grid fills the touchscreen and clues line the vertically-oriented top screen. Entering a word on the grid means zooming to an individual square and writing the desired letter. Once a letter has been entered, the game automatically moves to the next box so you can continue to solve the clue. The handwriting recognition software works phenomenally well, so you won't have to worry about the game registering an incorrect letter very often. If that does occur, simply writing over the old letter with a new scribble changes it.
Should you get stuck on a clue, hints push you in the right direction; however, there is a cost in time. Hints may offer additional clues for you to figure out the word or even fill in a letters to help speed the process. The more hints you ask for, the greater penalty exacted on your finishing time. Given how difficult most crossword puzzles are, it's a nice feature that will definitely come in handy.
Of course, the puzzles are only as tough as the level of difficulty you select. Crossword puzzles, along with word searches and anagrams, come in three flavours: easy, medium, and hard. An additional level of difficulty can be unlocked once you've completed enough puzzles.
Word searches offer a more accessible challenge, especially when compared to crosswords. Instead of writing the answers to cryptic clues in the touchscreen grid, you're tasked with scouting out words within a wall of letters. The words are listed on the top display, while the letters are jumbled together in a grid on the touchscreen. Highlighting a word takes a simple slide of the stylus over the corresponding letters on the display. If you're correct, the word is crossed out from the list.
But wait, there's more! Anagrams offer the penultimate in word gaming, providing you with a set of six random letters from which you create as many legitimate words as possible. If the game gives you the letters H, M, E, T, U, P, and S for example, you could piece together 'TEMP' or 'STUMP'. The goal is to create as many three-, four-, five- and six-letter words as possible. As when solving crossword clues, entering words during an anagram game involves writing them out with the stylus.
Totalling up all of the crosswords, word searches, and anagrams, the game packs in well over 1,000 puzzles. It's not going to deliver an exhilarating experience obviously, but Crosswords DS does promise a bit of quiet entertainment and it's certainly shaping up to be good value, too.
