I love puzzle games. Looking through the available selection of Japanese WiiWare launch titles, I couldn't help but give LONPOS a try, even with its 1,000 Wii Points asking price.

LONPOS for WiiWare is a virtual version of a real-world puzzle game of the same name. The real game consists of a 5×11 grid pre-filled with a number of unique shapes. There are 12 different puzzle pieces in total. The goal of the game is to completely fill in the grid with the pieces not already set in place. Sounds pretty easy, right?

It is, or at least it is in the early levels when you only need to slot in two or three pieces. Once you need to start placing four, five, or more pieces, things start to get a little difficult. Pieces can be rotated and flipped, and because of this a couple of pieces have up to eight distinctive configurations.

Some puzzles have more than one answer, but it's difficult to know what pieces to put down, and where to put them, to start building toward a solution. This is especially apparent in the level 9 puzzle, which only starts you off with two preset pieces, asking you to fill in the other 10. Did I mention you only get 10 minutes to do it? That's probably the reason why the level 9 section is marked with a skull and crossbones icon.

The entire game is built around the placing of pieces into an empty grid, but there are a few different modes to help mix things up a bit. One single-player mode is a test to see how many consecutive correct pieces you can place on the grid. There is a two-player game that is a race to clear puzzles. This can be played locally or over Wi-Fi. There are also online rankings tables with which you can compare your single player mode scores with everyone else who has the game.

From a technical standpoint, LONPOS feels very rough around the edges. There is no widescreen or progressive scan support. The game doesn't let you know when you've finished all the puzzles in a difficulty level, which means you may repeat some puzzles if you're not aware of what you've done previously. And if not for the very challenging puzzles, the drab look and feel of the entire game would bore you to death.

More than anything, playing LONPOS for WiiWare wants me want to hunt down one of the plastic puzzles, so I can solve some of these things myself, without the sometimes-clunky control interface getting in my way. I can't complain because I've never heard of this puzzle before I downloaded the game, and as it turns out, I like the puzzle a lot. I wish the game it is featured in would have had a little more heart put into it, though.