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The NY Times Crossword Puzzles offers both. There are absolutely scads of puzzles in this program -- all the Sunday puzzles from May 18, 1986 to January 4, 1987, and then what seems to be every puzzle until December 30, 1994. You’re not going to run out soon. And “NY Times” puzzles are challenging enough to keep you entertained for hundreds of hours. Single puzzles will keep you going for a few hours, and the box promises more than 1,000 puzzles. The Monday puzzles are “easier” (heh), and they progress in difficulty until the purely sadistic Sunday puzzles.
The game does have a few issues, however. You can play it in two modes -- Smart Mode, where it tells you when you get words or letters right or wrong, and Silent Mode, where it’s supposed to not tell you you’ve got it right until you fully complete the puzzle. However, the engine seems to be so built around informing you that you’re right with words that it takes serious tweaking of settings after you turn it on Silent Mode to truly have it, err, silent. The program still beeps when you get a word right unless you turn it off, and even then it skips over letters in correct words (but not for incorrect ones) until you turn THAT off. For a puzzle purist like me, that’s a pain in the butt. There are buttons to check if a letter or word is correct as well, and those can come in handy when you have two words crossing and no clue what either of them is. But I would have preferred a setting for a “true” Silent mode.
The NY Times Crossword Puzzles offers a few other neat features. You can print out the puzzles to take with you, for one, and it can time you on each puzzle -- although this tends to be more embarrassing than anything else. Sometimes, however, I feel like there’s a typo in the clues, although I can’t be sure, as I don’t happen to have old copies of the Times lying around. They could be artifacts from the paper itself, of course. Or it could be the fact that the “Times” is known for fiendishly cryptic clues.
