The best way to picture Nintendo Crosswords DS is to start with the Sudoku mode in Nintendo's Brain Age series. Then replace the numbers with letters. The background, the interface, and the way the screen zooms in and out on a specific cell all caused me to vividly recall that earlier effort when I sat down to try the game at Nintendo's Spring Media Event.

A couple of minutes into the game I realized I wasn't playing a crossword puzzle any more. I was playing a word search. I soon discovered that the game featured anagrams as well. It's as if Crosswords DS aims to replicate a back-of-the-newspaper experience by offering these three popular word games.

All three of these games play much like you'd expect them to given the touch screen capabilities of the Nintendo DS. You hold the system like a book, with the system oriented vertically in one hand and your stylus in the other. The left screen displays useful information like crossword hints or a list of words (for word searches and anagrams). If you're left-handed, this information would be on the right screen.

This leaves the touch screen for menu selection, various commands, and writing in letters. The hand-writing recognition works in the majority of cases, but my capital I's were always read as lowercase L's, so I simply switched to lowercase to solve my problem. The game also had trouble recognizing my lowercase G's, so I had to modify the way I scribbled them on the touch screen to make things go along smoothly. The word searches were easier to control since you don't need to write anything: just touch, drag, and release to highlight found words.

One grouch was that I had to explicitly convey whether I was moving down or across in the crossword puzzles by toggling a touch screen icon. Entering a letter causes the screen to automatically scroll in the direction dictated by this setting, meaning switching between solving a word sideways and solving one vertically requires an extra manual tap of the touch screen. It isn't a large concern, but it does break the flow of the game when you forget to do it.

Tapping the pause command gives you an option to save a puzzle and resume it later, but it seems that once you re-enter that mode, opting not to continue that puzzle erases the save. You can also toggle visual and aural cues for when you input incorrect letters in crosswords (I opted to be hardcore and switch this option off), or use a limited number of hints per crossword puzzle to help you out.

The simpler crossword puzzles are little more than four-by-four grids of interlocking words, but later puzzles take on the complex but familiar layouts found in the newspapers. Word search puzzles have themes like sports or animals, so you'll have an idea of the sorts of words to look for. And anagrams… well, that's just pure wordsmithing: take six seemingly random letters to form equally random three, four, and five letter words.

Perusing the entire selection of viewable puzzles, not all of which I could immediately play, I counted 500 crossword puzzles available in both the easy and medium difficulties; the two harder difficulty levels and their puzzles hadn't been unlocked at the event. Of the small and large word searches, I counted another 200 puzzles. Again, puzzles in a third more difficult category were not yet unlocked. Anagrams came in four, five, and six letter varieties, but the game didn't give any hint as to the number available since it launches the player right into the puzzle once they've chosen a difficulty.

The game offers a simple tutorial mode for those unfamiliar with the games, but there are virtually no other bells and whistles. Still, I'd caution players not to dismiss the power that mere crossword puzzles have. In my quest to play test the title thoroughly, I'm fairly certain I spent around an hour chained to the pink DS Lite used for demonstration.