Mario's Picross

14 Jul 2011 4 Aug 2011 }} Mario's Picross is a puzzle game for the Game Boy developed by Jupiter and the first game in the Nintendo-published Picross series. It was released in 1995 and stars Mario who appears in the role of an archaeologist. Mario's Picross is based on paint by number puzzles known as nonograms. Several sequels have been released since then. Most of them are Japan-only games.

Modes
The game features 256 puzzles in total. All puzzles are a size of 15x15 squares, except for the 5x5 and 10x10 square puzzles of Easy Picross that are aimed at beginners. The puzzles are split into modes (64 puzzles each): The first two modes, where the puzzles can be played in any order, follow the same rules. Before playing the game, the player can decide to get a hint, which means that the correct squares of a row and a column are already scraped when starting the puzzle. A roulette the player has to stop defines which lines are revealed, which can make a puzzle easier to solve, though it is possible to solve them all without using hints. Each puzzle has a time limit of 30 minutes. Marking squares with an "X" that should be scraped incurs no penalty, but scraping squares that should not be scraped reduces the time limit. The first mistake costs two minutes, the second one four minutes, and any others eight minutes each, meaning that a maximum of five mistakes can be made. If time runs out before the player has revealed the picture, the game is over. For each puzzle, the first and best times are saved, with an "H" to the left of the time if a hint was used to solve a puzzle.
 * Easy Picross (for beginners)
 * Picross (split into two courses)
 * Kinoko Course
 * Star Course (unlocked after completing Kinoko Course)
 * Time Trial (unlocked after completing Star Course)

The last mode known as Time Trial comes with different rules. The player does not get a hint at the beginning and there is no time limit. The game does not note wrongly scraped squares, so the player does not know whether a mistake has been made. The 64 puzzles appear randomly; the player is not able to select a specific puzzle.

Picross

 * Kinoko


 * Star

Trivia

 * The high score initials in Time Trial are NIN (Nintendo), APE (Ape Co.), JUP (Jupiter Co.), MAR (Mario) and PIC (Picross).