I had quite a few jigsaws when I was younger. They were pretty boring affairs too be honest – usually pictures of ships, the English countryside or kittens. But I rarely completed them. Not because they were too difficult of course – because the dog would always end up eating half the pieces or I’d lose them down the back of the sofa.
Neither of these are a drawback with BrainsBreaker, which despite the name, is not some kind of mind-bending puzzle compendium. It’s actually a really fun to use jigsaw creator that allows you to create your own jigsaws with your own images. So if you’ve ever fancied smashing your bosses face to pieces and putting it together again, now’s your chance.
The program accepts any JPEG image and allows you to select various levels of difficulty before breaking it up into several pieces and spreading it across the playing area. All you have to do is simply drag and drop the pieces with your mouse. Don’t worry if the pieces don’t fit as they should do occasionally – sometimes you have to hover the pieces in exactly the right position and eventually they should magically click into place. In fact, the size of the image and number of pieces playable is only limited by the size of your screen this game is also a great excuse to buy that 32-inch screen you’ve wanted for ages and get the whole family involved. One of the minor drawbacks however is that it doesn’t allow multiple players to play together so you’ll have to share the mouse between you.
If you create an absolutely gigantic jigsaw, then you do have some advanced options which allow you to either move whole chunks together or start from the edges and move inwards. If you’re simply having too much trouble identifying the pieces, you can resize the image via a magnifier too to zoom in on what you’ve got left. Scoring is optional based on how many pieces you manage to fill although the real pleasure is in just seeing it come together.
A truly personal way to enjoy the classic jigsaw game and best of all, you’ll never have to worry about losing the pieces again!
