Quiet as you like, Rittai Picross (Picross 3D) recently slinked its way onto Nintendo of Japan's release schedule, with a launch date of March 12th. As a puzzle game, Picross has never really relied on lashings of dialog, so this may just be import-friendly enough to consider buying!

That said, we do sort of fear this funky-looking update to the excellent first game. If any puzzle game on the DS has made us feel thick as mince, it was the later stages of Picross. Adding a third dimension risks driving us ever so slightly mad, as we attempt to wrap our mushy minds around the concept.


[Via Siliconera]

Math is fun! Or something. Normal people likely don't put much stock in the words, but every now and then a complex equation or three can be a great way to get the mathy part of your brain up and going. You could also just play Picross DS, an interesting take on the puzzle genre that emphasizes numbers and clever calculations over explosions and unbridled quirkiness. That probably paints Picross in one of the least interesting ways possible, but, uh, just run with it, okay?

Picross is fun. I didn't fully expect it to be the first time I fired it up, but wonders never cease when a refreshingly different kind of puzzle and the charm of Nintendo's Touch Generation series unite in nerdy, digital glory. With a ton of puzzles to conquer and numerous different modes of play, Picross certainly has a bevy of content to work with, transforming it into a title definitely worth snagging for your daily commute. Sure, some of those later puzzles might take longer than your lunch break, but Picross DS is still a supremely portable title, and one definitely suited for this week's edition of Gaming to Go. Want to hear more? Click that big button there and start believing in the power of numbers.

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Nintendo recently filed a veritable smorgasboard of DS-related trademarks in Japan. How many is a smorgasboard? In this case, it's forty. All but three of the terms are preceded by either "DS" or "DSi," and the mind can only boggle at the potential of some of these: DSiMovie, DSiMusic, DSiMail, DSArcade, DSBook, DSCreator, DSLive, and DSPhone were among the names that excited us the most. A full list is after the break.

Siliconera dug all of these up from the Japanese trademark database, along with a couple of other interesting tidbits, including potential English names for Tomodachi Connection (in which players get to be friends with Mii versions of Miyamoto, Reggie, and Iwata!) and Ritai Picross (Picross 3D), which we definitely wouldn't rule out for a western release.

Obviously, none of these might mean a single damn thing. Companies indulge in trademarking all the time, simply to protect future ideas. Time, as always, will tell.

The worst bit about big industry events for impatient bloggers and readers? The game assets. Oh Lordy, the assets. An absolute landslide of screens, usually scattered about across, ooh, dozens of pages.

But not at DS Fanboy! Not on our watch! Because we wub you, readers, we've collected a big old stack of new screens for your viewing pleasure and placed them all after the break of just one post. This post, in fact. From the well-known to the obscure, we'd be amazed if there's not at least one game that appeals to everyone past that line of blue text. Mario & Luigi 3, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time (right), Professor Layton and the Last Time Travel, Shining Force Feather, and Picross 3D is only scratching the surface, so make the jump!

The DSi wasn't the only DS news out of Japan. A video showing Nintendo's upcoming lineup just happens to reveal several upcoming games for the handheld, all published by Nintendo themselves. It makes E3 look like a cruel joke. We've culled the totally new games from the video and listed them here, along with the games that we knew about but haven't seen video of yet. We'll have more info about each of these games when ... it exists! In the meantime, oh man new Mario & Luigi!

• Wagamama Fashion Girls' Mode: a fashion game from Nintendo! Neat.
  
• Aruite Wakaru Seikatsu Rhythm DS: The fitness game with the pedometer.
  
• Sekai no Gohan Shaberu! DS O-Ryouri Navi: a sequel to Cooking Guide that is based on recipes from around the world -- we're guessing the exact ones featured in other regions' versions of Cooking Guide.
  
• Some kind of fortune telling thing involving tarot and palm reading. Taboo: The Sixth Sense 2K9!
• Tomodachi Collection, some kind of thing that lets you interact with Miis. This looks like none other than a resurrected Stage Debut!
  
• Mario & Luigi RPG 3!!!
• Made in Wario/Wario Ware, although Wario's name doesn't actually appear in the tentative title. It's, like "Made in Series" or something. But it's clearly Wario.
  
• A brutally insane 3D Picross.

The last time the retail giant did one of these deals, there wasn't much in the way of worthwhile titles in order to get some of you off the fence and spending. Perhaps the same can be said of the stock participating in this most recent deal, but we'd beg to differ. If you still haven't picked up Sonic Rush, then we suggest you nab that and one of these other included titles:

• Bubble Bobble: Double Shot
• Barnyard Blast (it may not be that good, but it's a piece of DS Fanboy history)
• Spanish For Everyone (because it's hilarious)
• Picross DS

There are other games, such as some board game compilations, so we suggest you head over and check out the sale for yourself.

[Thanks, Feba!]

The Wii's Nintendo Channel, then. It's enjoyed a somewhat shaky start if you ask us, particularly where DS demos are concerned. Although we love occasionally receiving bite-size portions of games such as Arkanoid, most demos are ... well, to be frank, they're old. Not just regular old, either, but Jesus and his pet triceratops trekking across the ravaged plains of Pangaea old.

The situation is especially grim in Europe, where Tetris DS (original release date: April 2006) has just joined a list that includes (amongst others) the ancient likes of Big Brain Academy, Brain Training, Mario Kart DS, 42 All-Time Classics, and Sight Training. Needless to say, we've only downloaded a small handful of games since the service debuted. To us, a demo of Brain Training is about as useful as a plasticine climbing frame.

Then again, maybe we're being overly critical, grumbly bastards. Maybe some of you good people actually get quite a lot of use out of the service. So we thought we'd throw this issue open to you, our beloved readers, and ask: how often do you use the Nintendo Channel demos?

Training, training, training. That's all us Europeans and Aussies want, right? Day in, day out, there we are, blurting "blue" into our handhelds like obedient farmyard animals, and being told that we're doing it wrong and that we're thuddingly simple. We know this happens, because the sales charts tell us so, and now the first DS demos on the local Nintendo Channel (released on all PAL consoles today) reflect the self-improvement obsession that has swept many PAL countries.

So, instead of getting demos of totally rad, new games such as Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword (which is what the U.S. got), we get four training games (only one of which came out this year) from the seven titles available, and adverts for Nintendogs and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. The only bright spot? A couple of tracks from Mario Kart DS, and a Picross demo, but those are hardly fresh titles.

We're not usually the types to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there's a stunning lack of variety on display here, Nintendo. Hit the break for the infuriatingly vanilla list.

Assuming you have the Opera Channel and an internet-capable Wii, there are sites that let you play picross with Wiimote compatibility for free. We wouldn't mind paying for a picross game, though, as long as it offered fun gameplay and came at a budget price. That's why we're once again jealous of Japanese gamers, who are getting not one but two picross-esque games for us to envy.

The first comes from Hudson, and is a part of the company's puzzle series. This disc-based game (called Puzzle Series Vol.2: Illustlogic + Colorful Logic) offers 600 picross puzzles, only some of them are doubly hard since they involve multiple colors.

The second title is a WiiWare game that we already told you about, called Oekaki Logic. Is there a likelihood of either of these games getting localized? Probably not, unfortunately, but we really hope that Hudson comes through on this one.

[Via Siliconera]

Japanese developer Compile Heart, which contains members of Compile (who developed Puyo Puyo and just about everything else we have loved) plans to release a three-part (so far) series of puzzle games for the DS, called the Puzzle Mate series. Crossword Mate features Japanese crosswords, Nanpure Mate is a "number place" (also known as sudoku) game, and Oekaki Mate is a picross collection. These, however, differ from other such products in one important way: the puzzles are large. All three collections feature larger playing fields than usual, which leads to things like the nightmarish multi-screen picross puzzle seen in the screenshot here.

And speaking of nightmarish, coulrophobes will be terrified to see the mascot for this series, a clown drawn by Famitsu artist Susumu Matsushita.

Read - Crossword Mate
Read - Nanpure Mate
Read - Oekaki Mate

kdice (Web)

Take Risk. Simplify the rules and create a bunch of new maps. Add an intuitive web-based interface and a complex worldwide ranking system. Make the game entirely free to play and attract a solid stable of online players, available at all hours of the day. The result is one of the most addictive strategy games you've probably never heard of.

Phase (iPod)

A must-have game on the iPod? Yep. I'm as surprised as anyone. Apple's music player puttered through Tetris remakes, solitaire, and other obvious clones until Phase established some gaming muscle. (And sure, Musika gets some credit for being unique, but it's more visualizer than game.)

Developed by Harmonix, Phase is a simple Guitar Hero-style beat-matching game. Tap a fifth-generation (video) iPod, Classic, or recent Nano's left, center, and right buttons in time with the music and on-screen prompts. Slide a finger around the wheel to catch falling dots. And that's it. The game becomes so much more because of its quirky visuals and ability to sync to your own songs. Nearly any genre works, especially music with a percussive bass line. While the console rhythm games let you buy new track downloads, Phase's unlimited replay with your own songs makes it a no-brainer for a portable music player.

Pac-Man Championship Edition (XBLA)

If not worthy of a Top 10 spot, then certainly Pac-Man deserves Joystiq's 'Comeback Player of the Year' award. I covered Pac-Man CE's overblown launch in early June, but it wasn't until I became a devoted player at home that I realized the sheer genius of the first true Pac-Man sequel since 'the Ms.' hit the maze in '82. Designer Toru Iwatani managed to scrape off a quarter-century of rust and fashion a remarkably relevant game that held me down during an otherwise punishing summer drought. Geometry Wars might be the most celebrated, but Pac-Man CE is Xbox Live Arcade's true star.

You can easily predict the next couple of panels in this strip, but that doesn't make it any less funny! This cautionary comic reminds all the smokers out there why they shouldn't play with their Nintendo DS while sucking on a cigarette -- like smoking, it's just not a good idea in general! Put out that cancer stick, spray some Febreze around you, and join us past the break for the rest of this tragic, NSFW tale.

See also: Cheap stylus gifts that aren't really styli

When determining the best games of the year, it's a good idea to go at it from different angles: by referencing our own history of reviews, obviously, but we must also look to the wider journalism community. Our reviews, while insightful and entertaining, were not comprehensive. We just didn't play everything. In addition, one reviewer's opinion is simply not sufficient data to make definitive conclusions, even if that one reviewer is me.

So we turned to everyone else in aggregate to see what they thought of this year's releases. We've gathered the top 10 DS games of 2007 according to their Metacritic ranking. Keep in mind that many of these games tied in Metascore, meaning that if we were to rank the games, there would be fewer than ten positions. It's still sequential, but with a lot of tie scores.

We then carefully applied science to these games in order to convert the Metacritic numbers into a rubric we feel more accurately conveys the quality of these games. Head past the post break for Metacritic's top ten DS games of 2007, graded on a scale from adorable kitten video to unbelievably adorable kitten video.