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[MSXdev04] - Let's Play Karoshi Corporation's Picture Puzzle (2004) - Stages 01-12

296 views · Published 14 July 2011 · 12:18 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: FiXato · 2011 · Gaming

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Let's Play (the first 11 stages of) Picture Puzzle, an 8K MSX ROM submitted by Karoshi Corporation to MSXdev04 programming contest.
MSXdev is a great initiative that originally had the goal to "celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the MSX standard".
At the time MSX2 was dominant in the scene, as most games that were still being developed, focused on MSX2.
The MSXdev competitions eventually ended up being so successful for the MSX(1) popularity, that nowadays the majority of games for our beloved homecomputer system seem to be for MSX instead of MSX2.

In 2004 the second edition of MSXdev was held. Since MSXdev03 was cancelled, all donations for that contest were added to the fund for MSXdev04 instead.
While MSXdev03 had only 3 submitted entries, the 2004 edition got 16 finished submissions!

I'm planning to be playing through all of the MSXdev games during a non-narrated Let's (Quickly) Play MSXdev Games series.
After Daniel Vik's Yahtzee, Dioniso's Penguin Race, and CEZ GS's Teki Paki, Guzuta Raster Leisure's Sink King's, HL-Soft's Chocobo Racing, Kralizec's Tetris games, and Dioniso's Gniffel, we'll now try to tackle Karoshi Corporation's Picture Puzzle!

Karoshi Corporation consists of Eduardo A. Robsy Petrus (Programming, Main Design & Additional Graphics), and Jon Cortazar Abraido (Graphics, Musics & Stages)
For Picture Puzzle, Rebeca Llaguno was responsible for some additional stages.

Picture Puzzle is a Nonogram/Hanji/Griddlers game, which is a logic puzzle game "in which cells in a grid have to be colored or left blank according to numbers given at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture" [wikipedia].
For more detailed description of the game (including tips), I would suggest you either read the manual that comes with Picture Puzzle, or read this handy wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram

When I first saw this game listed, I thought to myself: "Oh my god.. do I *have* to play this game?" since I usually don't really like these kinds of logic games (because I simply rather suck at them:P). Not wanting to be a quitter, I decided to at least give the game a go and probably give up after a few stages and call it a video.
After having read the Wikipedia article (and later the manual as well), I actually got the hang of it and kept on playing. Getting to the first 10x10 stage I was kinda shocked by how hard it suddenly became again, but even these puzzles I've managed so far to solve eventually. At the moment I've reached stage 23, and noticed that my video was running over half an hour! Therefor I've split it up into 3 videos and decided to change it from a Let's Quickly Play to a Let's Play that I will continue at a later time.

The fact that the game actually kinda got me hooked, says a lot for itself. The controls are easy, design is clean and the game concept (though not original), is addictive. The only thing that *really* gets annoying after a while, is the music. Especially when you are focusing on the puzzle, it is distracting.
Needless to say I used the pause button on the openMSX emulator a lot. It might sort of be a form of cheating, watching me stare at a puzzle for minutes on end would also get boring I guess. :P

The Load World option didn't work for me by the way, but I guess you need additional stages on cassette/CD for that to work via the cassette port.
The continue option is probably used to enter passwords, so you can continue where you left off. Since I'm using an emulator with savestates, I won't be using that options much.

As usual, this recording was made using the cross-platform open source MSX emulator openMSX. For more information, see the official openMSX project page at http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/
This recording was made with 0.8.1 Development Build 12178, available from http://openmsx.fixato.net, home of the unofficial development builds of openMSX for Mac OS X and Windows x86 & x64.
I used the Toshiba HX-10 configuration for this recording.

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