Puzzle Madness

Puzzle Madness is a single-player jigsaw puzzle game with four game modes and many options for accessing and editing images.

There are four game modes of this product are:* Jigsaw: this is what would typically be expected from a product of this type. An image can be broken into an easy puzzle with 25 pieces, a moderate puzzle with 100 pieces, a hard puzzle with 250 pieces or a custom puzzle with between 2 and 6000 pieces. Additionally pieces can optionally be rotated either randomly or randomly but at 45 degree increments. They may also land face up or a mixture of face up and face down.
Games may be timed and the player can put them into 'boxes' to group similar pieces together, use auto align functions, cheat with 'find the neighbouring piece and auto complete options and so on.

• Mosaic: this turns the image into a sliding block puzzle, the image can be broken into an easy 3x3 puzzle, a moderate puzzle with 5x5 tiles, a hard puzzle with 10x10 tiles or a custom puzzle with between 2 and 99 tiles. Additionally pieces can optionally be rotated randomly through 90 degrees.

• Switch: like the Mosaic option this turns the picture into a series of blocks but instead of sliding them around the player swaps blocks around by clicking on them in pairs which then exchange places. The puzzle configuration options are identical to a Mosaic puzzle.

• Balls: this is an unusual puzzle format in which circles are cut out of the chosen picture. Again there are four degrees of difficulty, easy in which there are 10 holes to fill, moderate with 35 tiles, difficult with 100 tiles or a custom puzzle with between 1 and 250 tiles. Additionally pieces can optionally be rotated randomly through 45 degrees or, for increased difficulty, there's a pure random rotation option.

All games are automatically saved at the outset and can be saved when part completed. All games are scored and the scores are saved by user id.

The game comes with a selection of pictures as one would expect. Unusually the game also has options to use the player's own pictures, select a frame from an AVI format video file, or link to the players scanner or camera and import an image via a TWAIN interface. There are also functions to edit and save a picture from any of the above sources prior to using it in a puzzle. There is also an option to connect to the player's e-mail client to send and share puzzles

The product also comes with 14 day demo versions of Stitch, a product that will convert an image from the above sources to a cross stitch pattern, and another product that converts an image into a paint-by-numbers format that can be printed.