240. Mario no Super Picross (Ape, Super Famicom (Switch), 1995)

As we covered in my writeup of game #83, Picture Puzzle, I can't get enough of video games featuring nonogram logic puzzles. Picross is by far the most storied nonogram video game franchise, and while the series has become the bland, Sudoku-aesthetic, for-everyone game that it deserves to be, it wasn't always so utilitarian.

Mario no Super Picross is Nintendo's second Picross title, and features an archaeological dig theme like its predecessor. There is a kind of mysterious music that plays in the menus that I think is supposed to underscore the theme of unearthing tiles, but when you finish a puzzle, there is a very Super Mario World-sounding jingle that plays. After you clear Mario's first 15 puzzles, you can then select from Wario's puzzles, which have subjects that are slightly weirder, like the sole of a foot, a mosquito coil, or a theif. Wario's puzzles also do not penalize you for making mistakes (much like current Picross), and they feature better accompanying music, so I tend to prefer those to the Mario stages.

There aren't as many quality of life features like you'd find in a modern Picross game. Developer Jupiter has really considered how to make solving a nonogram puzzle a smooth experience on a controller, a problem they had basically solved by the time of Picross DS. That is to say the actual control experience is not quite as smooth as I'm used to in Mario no Super Picross, though it's also not horrible by any means.

The best part, though, is after you finish a puzzle, the image springs to life with animation and color. I know including animations would be a huge amount of work in the modern Picross games, but its' something I always missed after starting my Picross journey with the similarly-animated Mario's Picross on Game Boy. Another bonus of playing this Japan-only game, is that I get to learn a new Japanese vocabulary word every time I finish a puzzle. Did you know in Japan, they call satellite dishes "parabola antennas"? Interesting stuff!

4/5, some nice relaxing, old-school Picross (with animations!)