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The New York Times Crossword Puzzles

Score: 80%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Wizard Works
Developer: GraphicCorp
Media: CD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Puzzle

Graphics & Sound:

The graphics that appeared to me upon starting The New York Times Crossword Puzzles up for the first time worried me -- ugly buttons on a picture of Ma Liberty. Thankfully, after a bit of tweaking and setting the puzzles up to display in pseudo-3D, the program itself looked plenty nice. I’m not talking massive animated sequences or anything -- it’s a crossword puzzle program, what do you expect? But the buttons are understandable and the interface clean.

The minimal sound effects -- beeping and whatnot -- are easy to turn off, and if you want to play the game “honestly,” you’ll, in fact, have to turn them off. Not exactly a gorgeously presented program, but you don’t buy a crossword puzzle program for presentation. You buy it for content and usability.


Gameplay:

Good thing that The NY Times Crossword Puzzles offers both. There are absolutely scads of puzzles in this program -- all the Sunday puzzles from May 18, 1986 to January 4, 1987, and then what seems to be every puzzle until December 30, 1994. You’re not going to run out soon. And “NY Times” puzzles are challenging enough to keep you entertained for hundreds of hours. Single puzzles will keep you going for a few hours, and the box promises more than 1,000 puzzles. The Monday puzzles are “easier” (heh), and they progress in difficulty until the purely sadistic Sunday puzzles.

The game does have a few issues, however. You can play it in two modes -- Smart Mode, where it tells you when you get words or letters right or wrong, and Silent Mode, where it’s supposed to not tell you you’ve got it right until you fully complete the puzzle. However, the engine seems to be so built around informing you that you’re right with words that it takes serious tweaking of settings after you turn it on Silent Mode to truly have it, err, silent. The program still beeps when you get a word right unless you turn it off, and even then it skips over letters in correct words (but not for incorrect ones) until you turn THAT off. For a puzzle purist like me, that’s a pain in the butt. There are buttons to check if a letter or word is correct as well, and those can come in handy when you have two words crossing and no clue what either of them is. But I would have preferred a setting for a “true” Silent mode.

The NY Times Crossword Puzzles offers a few other neat features. You can print out the puzzles to take with you, for one, and it can time you on each puzzle -- although this tends to be more embarrassing than anything else. Sometimes, however, I feel like there’s a typo in the clues, although I can’t be sure, as I don’t happen to have old copies of the Times lying around. They could be artifacts from the paper itself, of course. Or it could be the fact that the “Times” is known for fiendishly cryptic clues.


Difficulty:

HARD. H-A-R-D. Even the easy ones. Really. I love crosswords to death, and I’ve always found the “Times” to be the most challenging source of puzzles. Get ready to have your brain explode when you work on these puppies. If you’re a casual puzzler, one who prefers “Fast ‘n Easy” to “Challenger,” you’ll probably want to stay far, far away. You’ll only get frustrated when you have to click “Solve Word” constantly.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.


Game Mechanics:

Once you’ve got the controls under, err, control, you can basically run the whole thing from the keyboard, especially in Silent Mode. There’s really nothing fancy about the game interface, and there really shouldn’t be -- the closer to full immersion into the puzzle, the better. It almost makes me wish I had a stylus of some sort that I could write the answers in, but -- that’s another dream for another day.

The New York Times Crossword Puzzles has its issues. The interface could have been cleaner and it could have been easier to set it up for true Silent Mode. The puzzles are also hellishly difficult, but that’s not anyone’s fault but the people that made the puzzles. If you’re a true crossword buff, I suggest you pick up this title -- you’ll keep yourself amused for hours. The casual puzzler, however, may get more frustrated than they like with this title. You be the judge.

Me, I’ll keep playing the damn thing. I like being stomped upon every now and then by a 14-year-old puzzle.


-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications
AKA Phil Bordelon

Minimum System Requirements:



P200, Win9x, 16MB RAM, 50MB HD Space, 8X CD-ROM, 16-bit Video Card
 

Test System:



Windows 98 running on a K6-III 450 w/256MB RAM, 6X/24X DVD-ROM drive, SoundBlaster Live!, Creative Labs Riva TNT2 Ultra w/32MB RAM

Windows Mortyr: 2093-1944 Windows NIRA Intense Import Drag Racing

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated