Imported Picross with Mario's Super Picross
Another day, another Picross game, haha. I was looking for something mindless and quick to play, so I decided to check out Mario's Super Picross on Nintendo Switch Online. It's one of a handful of games that was only released in Japan but has been made available since, so it's great to see what was the second entry in the Picross series. (The last 2D Picross game I played was Picross DS, which I played about a year and a half ago.) Mario's Super Picross game is sandwiched in between the original Game Boy release and the subsequent return to Game Boy called Picross 2, and this game adds a few features that have been carried into later games, such as little animations when you complete a puzzle. The main new feature is that there's a separate "Wario" mode where the game doesn't tell you when you make a mistake, in contrast to the usual rules where each stage has a time limit and mistakes eat up your available time.
Otherwise this is just the usual Picross we know and love. The game is presented in the original Japanese, but if you know the general rules of Picross you shouldn't have any trouble playing it. I played through the first set of puzzles for both modes, and although as always I enjoyed my time with the game, given the plethora of other Picross games available I didn't feel compelled to play through much more than that for this one. Overall this is a perfectly good iteration in the Picross series, but really pretty much all of them are equally good. This was a convenient and fun option, since it comes with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription and it was previousy only available in Japan. I do have a physical copy of Picross 2, so I'll definitely be checking that out at some point as well.