Reviewed: August 21, 2008
Reviewed by: Mahamari Tsukitaka

Publisher
Destineer

Developer
Destineer

Released: May 30, 2008
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1

5
6
5
6
5.5

Supported Features

Take USA Today Crossword Challenge, for example. This game is more or less a book of traditional newspaper crossword puzzles translated into an easily portable electronic format, and while it may not appeal to those of us who spend most of our gaming hours on Gears of War or Soul Calibur IV, it may be a suitable title for a more casual crowd.

In any case, we can probably all agree that Crossword Challenge is a pretty straightforward port of the traditional newspaper crossword puzzle experience onto the Nintendo DS, and you can play it in English or Spanish. It’s pretty easy to figure out the basics, even for players new to the DS. The 15x15 crossword puzzle and interactive menu icons appear in the lower screen of the DS, while the clues for both Across and Down appear in the upper screen.

To enter words into the puzzle, you select a box using your DS stylus, and you write the letter you’d like to enter in a black box on the right side of the touch screen. Alternatively, clicking on the keyboard icon will allow you to enter the letters using a touch screen keyboard instead—useful if, like me, you have some trouble with the game’s letter recognition feature. Clicking on the selected puzzle box again will switch between Down and Across.

So far, so good. Beyond the basics, though, the controls get a bit more confusing and difficult to use.

Firstly, the icons are difficult to figure out if you don’t look at the game manual. At this resolution, because of the art style of the graphics, it’s difficult to tell what some of the icons look like, let alone what they mean. Nevertheless, I’m not sure why a compass would indicate a hint feature, or why three spots of color would mean an in-game manual. The icon choices are bizarre.

Secondly, I still can’t figure out why there is a separate pencil and pen tool, as they basically do the same thing. You can erase letters written out in either tool, and it seems that the only difference between the two is that you can’t complete a puzzle until the entire thing is written out in pen and submitted. I don’t understand, then, why you wouldn’t just use the pen tool the entire time, as anything written in pencil will need to be re-written in pen before submission anyway.

And, thirdly, the entire crossword puzzle can’t fit on the screen of the DS, so you’ll occasionally need to scroll your view of the puzzle. This would normally be all right, except that the game asks you to hold your stylus on the screen and drag it to scroll, and it’s even more clumsily implemented and harder to use than it sounds. The D-pad would have been the intuitive choice, but it’s used, instead, for shifting the selected square, which could have been easily done by the stylus. You can only hold and drag to scroll on an unused puzzle square, and on top of that, the game beeps angrily at you the whole time you’re holding down the stylus, as if you’re doing something wrong.

Anyway, to make a long story short, there’s a good chance that the crossword puzzles (of which there are hundreds) are high quality, as the difficulty level seems to resemble that of the puzzles I’ve seen in newspapers before, but the game unfortunately suffers from some very bothersome game design issues.