Touching Will Short with a Stylus

During my last year in college, I started doing crossword puzzles. I blame the newfound addiction on the documentary "Wordplay," which first showed me how clever they were. I was never one for Sudoku or the Jumble, but there was something about the wit of crossword clues that had me hooked. I wasn't alone, either. Soon I started played with my roommate Puff, Karissa, Athena and whoever else decided to join us around the dinner table. We all started to get the hang of the crosswords in the Tribune-Review (our forte was the Wednesday puzzle).

Then I graduated. I didn't get the Trib at home, and I suddenly forgot about my joy of crossing words. That is, until I discovered a new game for the Nintendo DS. Majesco published a game called New York Times Crosswords, which featured over 1,000 puzzles published in the New York Times over the past few years.

I was a tad skeptical at first. Afterall, part of the satisfaction of doing a puzzle was writing on the newsprint, holding the folded page in your hand, and scanning over all the clues. How could a videogame possibly recreate the tactile pleasures of a puzzle in a newspaper?

Once I finally broke down and bought the game, my fears were quickly dashed. Sure it doesn't have the feel of holding a newspaper, but beyond that the differences are minute. Majesco made an amazing hand-writing recognition program for the game, and because of that I can just casually write the letters in the boxes and it understands. The game even recognizes cursive and lowercase letters (and if you have done a crossword with me, you know that not even I tolerate lowercase letters). My last experience with handwriting recognition was with the old Palm OS, which required the user to write vague symbols instead of the letters themselves. I was relieved to see how far things have come, especially on the DS.

A great aspect of the game is the feature that lets you play any day of the week. The way the NY Times crosswords are set up, the puzzles get harder as the week goes on (Saturday being the hardest... not the Sunday puzzle). You can work through puzzles in a number of ways: you could play through an entire week in order, you can choose specific days to play, or you could have puzzles randomly thrown at you. Because the Times puzzles are different from the Trib's, I've just been working on all Monday puzzles to get into the swing of things. The Times puzzles invoke more obscure, cultural references, but still maintain a lot of the gimmicks that I am used to with the Trib. Clearly, these are the puzzles to be playing--no matter how you feel about the journalistic integrity of the rest of the paper.

Finally, the best feature in the whole game, is the ability to play with others. Just like back in college, I can share a puzzle with someone else playing the DS, and we could work on the puzzle together. Better yet, if my friend got the game, we could play on our respective DS's over a wi-fi connection anywhere in the world. It was great working on these puzzles with my chums, and I hope that someday, we'll get to try it again using this game (if we don't have the luxury of being together in person, of course).

I'll always prefer working on a puzzle in the newspaper... but having 1,000 of them on a cartridge the size of a quarter isn't a bad alternative.