Nintendo never got around to announcing this new game at E3: a crossword game tentatively called Nintendo Crossword. For sudoku fans, a "crossword puzzle" is a grid puzzle much like sudoku, but with letters instead of numbers, and completely different rules in place of the sudoku rules.

Nintendo's presentation is much more staid than that of its competition, New York Times Crosswords, passing over odd color schemes and Comic Sans-alikes for a traditional newspaper-like display. It's boxy, but good.

Though we've already spent the afternoon filling your plate with enough puzzle posts to feed you for the next week, we'd be remiss not to mention today's full-version release of WordUp!, one of the finest homebrew games to ever hit the Nintendo DS. WordUp! follows the footsteps of other stylus-driven puzzlers like Tetris and Zookeeper, combining accesibility and portability for an addictive mix.

Linguaphiles will take great pleasure in connecting the game's adjoining letter blocks, spelling out words to clear chunks of the playfield. The top screen serves as a window to your inevitable doom, colorcasting the continuous stream of blocks piling on top of letters you've neglected. The game ends if you go too long without clipping a column, but you're presented with a satisfying record of your longest word, the number of words rubbed out, and which word was repeated most often.

In addition to its solid gameplay, developer Superpanic sweetened WordUp! with an unlockable arcade mode, three difficulty options, and an original and catchy soundtrack. Drop past the post break for more screenshots of this excellent game.

[Via Drunken Coders]

No, it's not another training game. Kotoba no Puzzle Mojipittan (Word Puzzle Mojipittan) is a Scrabble-style board game from Bandai Namco in which players use characters from the Japanese hiragana syllabary to spell words. Therefore, it's really, really, really hard to play if you don't know a load of Japanese words, and basically impossible if you can't read hiragana.

Mojipittan has appeared on other platforms before, but as the Shockwave demo says, "The stylus makes it simple!" We suggest giving the demo a shot and seeing if you're up for some wordplay. The bouncy music and adorable tile mascots may convince you to enroll in Japanese classes.

[Via GAME Watch]

As per our fine comrades at the affluent webcomic Penny Arcade, we residing at the fanboy congregated to bestow upon you a post of great vim. Certainly, the readership is quite familiar with the veritable monarchy that the DS Lite has been erecting via its accrued sales numbers; today, the standing ruler has evidently resisted its supplantation. The fact that the DS Lite might even transcend a neoteric console (in its third revision!) is a statement of certain verisimilitude, as we can easily ascertain from the following quantitative analysis:

- DS Lite: 228,939 65,665 (40.22%)
- PSP: 27,499 2,446 (8.17%)
- PS2: 22,703 874 (4.00%)
- GBA SP: 2,751 32 (1.18%)
- Game Boy Micro: 1,791 28 (1.54%)
- Xbox 360: 1,250 53 (4.43%)
- Gamecube: 855 18 (2.15%)
- DS Phat: 320 90 (21.96%)
- GBA: 22 8 (57.14%)
- Xbox: 0 12 (100.00%)

One might even conjecture that the leading candidate was, at one point, an inscrutable conundrum.

[Source: Media Create]