Anyone who's worked in a large corporate office environment knows that the best way to start the morning is to get the team together and solve the New York Times crossword puzzle over coffee. Trouble is, it'd often take half the morning to complete, and you'd need to call on as many resources as possible, both human and literary, to complete it.
The New York Times Crossword Puzzles for your PC is an electronic compilation of many of the hard-copy books you can get of these famous crosswords. The game is very bare bones. It includes around 1,000 puzzles (about two and a half years' worth), which are easily sortable. Anyone who's become hooked on NY Times crosswords knows that the puzzles start out easy on Monday and get progressively harder, until the nightmare, double-sized Sunday puzzle. The sorting engine lets you pick which day of the week you want, solve puzzles in order, just try all the Monday puzzles, or whatever your brain is in the mood for. You can also save your partially completed puzzles, which is especially handy for those tricky Thursday-through-Sunday games.
Beyond that, the gameplay is exactly as you'd expect. Compared with other crossword puzzle games, the developers have added several features to make playing easier. You can zoom in on a particular section so you can see the words more easily. When you're typing in your letters, the game lets you know right away if you've got the correct answer - letters are X'ed if they're incorrect. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to get help with a letter or word. Two large, shiny buttons in the menu at the top let you get a letter or word whenever you want. It's tough to stay away from those cheats when they're so tempting to use.
The game lets you customize the color of your puzzle in several different ways. It can be difficult to see your letters in the puzzle when they're just black on a grey background. However, when you change the color of your letters, you also change the color of the numbers on the puzzle, which really doesn't help you see what you're doing. After playing around with what I thought were some helpful contrasting colors, I ended up just going back to the default colors and zooming in on the areas I was working on.
The final feature of the game, if you can call it a feature in today's paperless world, is that you can print out your puzzles to take on the road with you. Though why you haven't just loaded the game on your laptop is beyond me - takeoff and landing, maybe? If you're desperate for the printed version, you'd do better to buy a hard-copy compilation or two for half the price of this already inexpensive game.
Don't get me wrong, if you love the New York Times crosswords, you'll like this game. It's easy to use for the most part, and it has a wide range of puzzles. In fact, what with so much attention being paid to massively multiplayer games, 3D graphics, and other mind-blowing PC game features, you may well find this game simple and refreshing by comparison.
