More than 10 years before Picross DS, there was Mario's Super Picross for Super Nintendo.

Ask anybody to name some Mario puzzlers and you'll most likely hear Dr. Mario, maybe Wario's Woods, Mario & Yoshi or Yoshi's Cookie. They never name the best of the lot though - Mario's Picross. The series had it's first game (Mario's Picross) on Game Boy in early 1995.

The original Mario's Picross had close to 200 puzzles. Basically, the object of the game is to chisel squares in a grid to form a picture. How is this done? Well, there are numbers on the sides of the grid. These will give you a hint as to what squares to chisel. For example, if there is a row of 15 squares and the number "10" next to it, that means that there are 10 squares next to each other in that row that have to be chiselled. You would have no idea where to place them (It could be the furthest left 10, the furthest right 10, or anything inbetween).

Now, if the numbers "10 4" would be next to the row instead, you'd be absolutely certain - It means there's a row of 10 squares, then at least one empty square, then another row of 4 squares. As the row is 15 squares long, that means it would be a perfect fit. If you make a mistake, you will lose some time (There is a time limit). If your time's up, you must restart the puzzle.

If you're completely stuck and have some time left, you can spend 5 minutes to buy a hint (A row and a column are filled after stopping a roulette). Each puzzle in Mario's Picross was 15 by 15 squares.

Mario's Picross also had a "Special" mode where you would not be told of mistakes - Thus leaving you in the dark as to whether you're solving the puzzle right or not. There was no time limit here, instead, there was a timer counting up to try and get a good time.

Unfortunately, Mario's Picross was a commercial failure outside Japan, leading Nintendo to not release the sequels worldwide. Japan proceeded to get Picross 2 (GB) and Mario's Super Picross (SNES) in the same year, and then 8 downloadable SNES sequels over the next 5 years (The SNES download service was Japan exclusive). Finally, in 2007, Nintendo released Picross DS worldwide, after 12 years of the games being exclusive to Japan.

Picross 2 for Game Boy introduced a few new elements. For starters, each puzzle was now 30 by 30 squares. They were all divided into 4 smaller, 15 by 15 segments. Basically, each puzzle was really 4 puzzles in one! The game also expanded "Special" mode into "Wario mode", with much more puzzles (The original "Special" mode only had a set of about 20 puzzles, from which it randomly picked one). The rules for the mode remained the same, except for one small change - Like Mario mode, Wario mode now had a time limit too. Since you "couldn't" make errors in Wario mode though, you would pretty much have to "wait out" all that time in order to run out, which would be pretty hard to do. Picross 2 had about 200 puzzles - 100 Mario, 100 Wario.

Mario's Super Picross improved much upon Picross 2. Puzzles were no longer all huge. The game starts with small, 5 by 5 puzzles, and eventually ends with puzzles as big as 25 by 20 (An odd number, but it works). Again, there is a Mario mode with hints and a Wario mode with no hints. There are about 280 puzzles total, split evenly between Mario and Wario. This time, in Wario mode, there is again no time limit, so you can spend as long as you want.

The music in the games is also quite good, by the way. The original two games only had 5 songs during puzzle solving each (Or you could turn music off), but you could select which one to play at any time. Super Picross now has 10 songs - 5 for Mario puzzles, 5 for Wario puzzles. You can still select which to play, but only for the mode you're in.

There's not much more to say about Super Picross - It's more of the same, really. And that's not bad at all, since, well, it's Picross! Whether you've played Picross before or not, Super Picross must be played - It's arguably the best in the series. Plus, since it starts out easy, it's great for beginners (The first two games are rather unforgiving at the start). Maybe after playing it, you can buy Picross DS too, if you haven't yet.

NOTE: The game is entirely in Japanese except for a few words (This was this way in the original release, so no, they didn't translate just those few words). However, it is still very easy to understand, so you shouldn't run into trouble. Also note that the game costs 900 Wii Points!