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Review: Super Jigsaw PuzzleReviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X v10.2.6 Review Date: May 28, 2003
My Aunt Mary loves puzzles. Absolutely adores them. She especially loves puzzles of artwork from that Thomas Kinkade guy..."the painter of light," I believe they call him. He's this guy who has stores in malls scattered across America, all selling only his work. That rocks, if you ask me. Can you imagine a rock band having its own store? Or an author? You know you've made it when you have a store selling only your stuff. Anyway, puzzles. I think I used to put a lot of them together when I was a kid, but that was mainly because Aunt Mary was always buying them for me. They were usually Star Wars puzzles. I distinctly remember one of Han Solo and Chewbacca in the Millennium Falcon, and I'm fairly certain it had 200 pieces. Maybe 40. It was either 200 or 40. Either way, my inherent desire to put things together eventually advanced to model airplanes, so I left puzzles behind.
GameHouse is a great website to which you can go to play online games. They've got a ridiculous number of Java and Shockwave games in a wide variety of categories, certainly resulting in many lost hours at the office. Many of the games are also available in "Super" versions that can be downloaded and registered. This gives you the ability to play offline at full screen, and usually adds extra game options, better sound and higher quality graphics. Super Jigsaw Puzzle is fairly unique in that, as far as I can tell, it's only available for offline play. The first thing you'll notice when downloading Super Jigsaw Puzzle is that it currently comes in three forms–Medley, Pets and Landscapes–with more on the way (in fact, GameHouse would like for you tell them what type of puzzle you would like to see incorporated in future editions). Each edition must be purchased separately, all at the same price. I think a better pricing scheme should be put into place here. If you purchase Medley, for instance, you should be able to download and register all future editions at a reduced rate. Each edition can be downloaded and played for one hour before it must be registered, however, so you can at least check out the different images to decide which edition you like best.
So, Super Jigsaw has pretty much everything the avid puzzler could want, but it brings along a few annoyances as well. First, unless you've got yourself a cinema display, you'll spend the first few minutes just cleaning up the board. There's not a lot of room to place 520 puzzle pieces on a smaller desktop, so hiding all but the edge pieces is pretty much a necessity. Second, the background colors are mostly pretty glaring. Aside from the grays and browns, I found most to be unusable as they yanked your vision away from the puzzle pieces. Although, perhaps that's the point...another difficulty setting.
While I'm questioning things, how about the ability to import your own photos. I think puzzle afficianados would jump at the opportunity to create puzzles of some of their own vacation shots or artwork of Han Solo and Chewbacca. And finally, it would be cool if there was some kind of little reward for completing a puzzle, such as the option to save the picture as a desktop image. As it stands now, Super Jigsaw simply lets you know you've completed the puzzle. Still, I can't deny that Super Jigsaw has captured the attraction of putting together a puzzle. It will by no means replace quiet evenings hunched over a card table, but it'll effectively kill some time on the bus or a lunch hour at the office. Oh, and don't worry; there's a timer built in, so you won't have to worry about missing your stop or upsetting your boss by cutting into the workday. After all, you've got your quota of Thomas Kinkade paintings to sell.  [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
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Now, however, they're on the computer. I can't build model airplanes on a computer, so I recently went back to puzzles to try out GameHouse's Super Jigsaw Puzzle. Aunt Mary would be so pleased. If she had a computer, or any desire to own one, I'd buy this for her in a second.
Each edition has 50 puzzles, so there's certainly enough in each to keep the puzzle enthusiast entertained for quite some time. Also, the user gets to determine the difficulty of the puzzle before it's broken up. You can play with as low as 4 to as high as 520 pieces, you can choose the shape of the pieces and the degree of skew, and you can determine if the pieces can be rotated when being mixed up. To help you along, you can zoom in on the board to find pieces that just don't seem to be there (not a worry, here, as pieces don't get lost or eaten by the family dog), you can hide all but the edge pieces to help you along in the beginning, and you can control the scattered pieces in numerous ways to to help find that one piece that's been eluding you for too long now.
Third, I'd like to see tigther integration between the different packages. If I load up Medley but would then like to do a Landscape puzzle, I have to quit Medley and launch Landscape. Is there a reason the two programs can't read each other's puzzles?