Just like an alcoholic just hearing or reading the name Picross makes me all excited.

And it started so innocent.


Don't temp me again, Mario!

As part of the Hana Festival last year Super Mario's Picross got released for Virtual Console in Europe. And since I always loved the game since I first played it on the GameBoy I immediately downloaded it. The game starts of easy and not very exciting, but once you unlock the Wario level, where you don't get any hints and more importantly no time limit, things get really good.

The first weeks I only played two or three puzzles every day, but after a while I got really involved in the game. So instead of a quick 15 minutes playing the game, I started to play the game several hours every day. Even after going to bed and waiting to fall asleep I would still think about the last puzzle I played.

But of course it wouldn't stop with me only thinking about it when awake. I actually started to have dreams about Picross. In my dreams I would only see the screen I try to solve the puzzle, but the puzzles got harder and the numbers changed so it was impossible to ever solve it.

After about two weeks with dreams only about Picross, I finally got to the conclusion, that I should never ever play that game again. There were only 5 puzzles left for me to clear in the game, but since the later puzzle can easily take 40 to 60 minutes (and if you make a stupid mistake somewhere be completely wasted) I deleted the game from my Wii system. I even went ahead and deleted the save.


This looks really exciting to me.

So now I have been clean for about 9 months, but everytime I see somebody play Picross on the DS, I feel uneasy and really want to play it. I guess it's like any other addiction.