Picross games and fakeout endings, name a more iconic duo

I don't get why this wasn't released! It's an accessible, friendly first Picross game which could have turned plenty of young Pokemaniacs into Picross addicts. The art is the clear highlight, with each image being quite lovely, especially for the hardware, and the Pokemon theming gives the game plenty of charm. There are 151 puzzles that you'll complete in the main game, one for each Pokémon (at the time). If you complete a puzzle, that Pokémon is added to your Pokédex, and the puzzle is marked with a Poké Ball. However, if you beat the puzzle under the target time, it's marked with a Great Ball instead. Is there any real reason to go for Great Balls on all of them? Not as far as I can tell! I came in under the target time on every single puzzle, and I'm unsure if anything in the game changed as a result. Probably not worth all the retries!

Throughout these 151 puzzles, I feel comfortable saying this is an entry-level Picross game. Nothing is too difficult, largely due to the small resolution of the Game Boy. This means that you won't encounter any puzzles larger than 15x15, though the game does fake its way to 20x20 and 30x30 pictures by splitting those images into 4 quadrants, essentially just being a group of 10x10 or 15x15 puzzles that must be completed in a row. It keeps things quite simple, but they definitely did the best they could with the hardware limitations. Though there is one adjustment made by the dev team that might be controversial; instead of actually drawing the pixels in the images, you're sort of highlighting over the lines in broad strokes, allowing for more detailed stills. You can see in this image how there are black lines underneath the dark blue filled squares. This does end up causing a LOT more completely filled-in rows than your average Picross game, but again, I think it works well as an introductory title.

However, after the game rolls credits, a new mode is unlocked. In the Safari Park, you'll be completing images of multiple Pokémon in a variety of settings. These puzzles skew towards the larger side, have stricter Great Ball times, and most crucially, multi-screen puzzles which are split into 4 quadrants no longer tell you if one quadrant has been successfully completed. You must verify for yourself that no required square has been left unfilled, which ultimately soured me on my experience quite a bit. When you're trying to make that Great Ball time, nothing is more frustrating than thinking you're done, only to have to go check your work across 4 different 15x15 puzzles, searching for the single pixel you missed. Later Picross games tend to change the color of the numbered prompts associated with a row or column once you have filled the proper number of squares, a QOL improvement which I desperately missed here. The game does allow you to mark the numbers yourself, but that takes enough time to do that I don't think I'd ever make a Great Ball time in the Safari Park while doing so.

In short, Pokémon Picross for the Game Boy is Baby's First Picross, until the Safari Park happens. I think it's a great introduction to this style of puzzle, and a much more worthwhile entry than other titles on the Game Boy. But there is a serious handbrake turn towards frustrating difficulty in the post-game, and I haven't even taken into account any time penalties for marking the wrong squares. As an unearthed relic that never saw a formal release, I think it's absolutely worth checking out, just don't expect anything groundbreaking.

In 1904, game designer, writer, reporter, Georgist and feminist Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord's Game: a scathing review of the contemporary trends of rent and land ownership (in the form of a board game). The idea was that players could understand the complicated web of "The Rich Get Richer" from a more simplified point of view. Fairness could be instilled in children when they play this game and realize how cruel the world could be if we let it. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, this did not work out. The world is still cruel because we have let it. Even more unfortunate for her, Parker Brothers made Monopoly in 1935, a game very much like The Landlord's Game, that quickly took the world by storm and became commonplace in American homes. Monopoly probably came to be due to some perfectly legal patent loopholes, but it's clear that a piece made to criticize greed eventually became a vehicle for it.

Perhaps Monopoly took off the way it did because The Landlord's Game is from the point of view of the owners of money and land. But what if it was from the point of view of someone who has no money?

Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is a scathing indictment of greed and the acquisition of money, more ferocious and toothed than anything The Landlord's Game could conjure up. It is made to inspire the soul crushing feelings of a minimum wage 9-5 and it does it very well. Most games demand you grind to work your way up. Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland demands you grind to lift your pathetic leg up on the first rung of the ladder.
Everything, down to talking with npcs, costs money. And you, as the titular 35-year-old virgin Tingle, (who has very, very little to do with the series he originated in) have none of it. Want to look at things in a store? Want to ask someone a question? Better clock in and beat up some animals to do an imaginary coin flip to get an item so that you can sell it for a paltry sum of rupees.

Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland works so much better as a piece of critical art than The Landlord's Game because it is terrible. It is boring, it is bland, it is repetitive, it is exactly what having a job is like. And brother? i quit this job after two days.

I hate this game. I recommend it to not only Zelda fans, but anyone who enjoys art.

I had so much fun playing this, I couldn’t stop until I finished. I was really happy to have Pearl and Marina featured in the DLC, and the story was simple but fun and sweet. Really loved seeing Marina gush over Pearl lol.

The game style is addictive, and difficult enough to be satisfying, but not infuriating when I can’t clear a level. I’ve only played one other roguelike and it was really frustrating, I didn’t even finish it..But Side Order makes me want to give them another shot! Sad that I was able to finish it so quickly, honestly.