Puzzle Arcade

It’s Christmas. What better present could you find under the tree than a jigsaw? How about an infinite number of jigsaws? Wow. Welcome to Puzzle Arcade!

Yes folks, an infinite number of jigsaws. I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by explaining how a jigsaw works… just know that the controls for this game pretty much let you assemble a jigsaw with no hiccups. Apart from the fact that the cursor is a bit slow, and sometimes the piece detection doesn’t seem to pick up on the fact that you have a joining piece ready to be placed. That aside, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

The game comes pre-loaded with 39 pictures suitable for assembling in all number of difficulties up to 1000+ pieces. The images vary from works of art and professional photographs all the way to magazine covers and pictures of Lara Croft. But wait, I hear you thinking, didn’t he say infinite puzzles? Why yes, gentle reader, I did. Using the Xbox Live Vision camera you can take a picture and turn it into a jigsaw. You could literally do that for ever. Or just once. Or not at all. It just depends how much the idea appeals to you I guess.

Both Carole and myself have played the game, and while it is fun in small doses it’s terminally boring for long sessions. The game also seemed to forget that we’d spent half an evening solving most of the picture puzzles to get Carole an achievement and so, when we returned to finish the last four pictures we found we had to do all bloody 39 again. That’s not such a brilliant feature.

And speaking of not such a brilliant feature – co-op mode is flawed as well. It’s great that you can work together to finish, say, a 1000 piece image of Lara Croft. It’s just a shame that the pieces are so small you have to zoom in to see them and then, if you or your co-op partner stray too far away, the game suddenly zooms out and you lose your bearings completely. Any more than 2 players in same console co-op play spells disaster as the little score boxes at the bottom serve to obscure a good portion of the playing area. So, co-op isn’t really the best thing to do big puzzles on – but then, do you actually want to play with your friends while you try to solve a 12 piece puzzle? Instead of co-op, why not just sit with your friends and have them point at the pieces that go together. Much easier, methinks.

Speaking of the 1000+ piece puzzles, I played on a HD 40-inch TV and could see cock-all without a serious amount of zoom, which then makes it hard to know where you are in the greater scheme of things. Otherwise, everything seems to work quite well – if you tweak the settings prior to beginning a puzzle you can have quite an enjoyable time working the grey matter to try and put the pieces together. If that doesn’t work for you there’s always the challenge mode, offering you 20 puzzles to solve under different pressures – time, annoying AI players, distorted images – until you reach the final challenge which is just a puzzle consisting of black and white squares. Mind-blowingly infuriating fun to be had there!