Jigsaw Wild: Put the pieces together and get your jumping monkey.

When I was a kid, I would watch daytime TV during the summer and do jigsaw puzzles. When I was finished, I'd be so proud that I'd make my Mom buy that puzzle glue stuff so I could fix the whole thing together and hang it on my wall.  There is just a wild sense of accomplishment that comes from putting random pieces together and forming something whole and complete.

Jigsaw Wild by 99 Games lets me take that feeling anywhere I want.  And, instead of spending hours and hours picking away at a 5000 piece puzzle (and invariably finding myself one piece short), I can spend one to three minutes and still get a little piece of that sense of accomplishment.


[Video review by HAL9000.]

What is it? What is it!? I think it's a turkey.

The gameplay is very intuitive and responsive to what you are trying to do.  Once pieces are connected, they move as one giant piece, and you can move any pieces to look under them.  It also "knows" fairly accurately when you are trying to click two pieces together.

Coolest of all, though, it lets you choose any picture from your photo library and make a puzzle out of it.  One flaw is that it takes landscaped pictures and, instead of rotating them, squishes them to portrait.  I'm hoping this will get fixed in future versions of the app.

Play in random or rectangle mode--I find rectangle mode to be much more difficult as you can't go by the connect-y pieces to give hints.  It's also less fulfilling, personally, because it lacks the nostalgia factor, but I appreciate the option.

Overall, a solid app.  Maybe in future updates they could add more puzzles, or even have a timed mode where you have to finish a puzzle in a certain amount of time to unlock a new puzzle.  A multi-touch "zoom in" and "zoom out" feature would be welcome, as well.  There are a number of add-ons that could work well in this app, and I hope 99 Games explores them.  But right now, the app is solid and fun, definitely worth $1.99.

Comments

[Rachel]

aww... you used Em's picture :)

[Julie]

Gotta love that picture!

[MEG]

LOVE THIS ONE!!!