I never understood the appeal of puzzle games until the most unlikely title turned me on to a world of gem swapping, tile sliding and block stacking wonders. I guess we've all got to start somewhere, right?

As a kid I was obsessed with platformers to the point where that’s pretty much all I’d play. Being able to discover an entire fictional world at my own pace and in my own way was the ultimate dream and I couldn’t imagine anything better... with that in mind, I was always perplexed by older people and their obsession with puzzlers.

Tetris was huge back in the day but I just never understood the hype. I’d see people sat there lining up blocks and think “Man, old people are morbid. When they’re not slaving away at work they spend their time watching people argue on television or match blocks for hours on end.”

I guess part of my distain for the genre was also my complete stupidity. I wasn’t a very bright child, I had trouble concentrating on things and always had my head in the clouds so anything more taxing than running from left to right was out of the window. I tried a few puzzle games when I was younger but I’d fail so quickly that I just didn’t see the point, not to mention I was yet to discover the wonders of high score chasing.

I’m telling you this story as my view on puzzle games changed very dramatically. It was almost as dramatic as my love for curry which was once deemed a food to go in the ‘never again’ pile before I finally re-tried it at the age of 13 and never looked back – Though for my waist-line that was probably a wrong turn. Alas, curry and puzzles are one of the same and much like my accidental new-found love of spicy gloop, puzzle games were set to re-emerge as something to obsess over for years to come.

I stumbled into the world of puzzles by accident in the early 2000’s when borrowing a game from my friend, I lent him the timeless classic ‘Wacky Races’ for Gameboy Color and he let me choose one of his to borrow so naturally, assuming it was a platformer, I went for ‘Mario & Yoshi’.

I was pretty glad we did the trade at the time, I’d played Wacky Races to death and whilst that soundtrack has a beat that lives on in my heart to this day, those race tracks could grow tiresome after a while – not only that but I was about to go on a family holiday so had a stern 2 hour drive to withstand which at age 10 and in a pre-smart phone world, seemed like a life time.

Firing up my Gameboy I was ready to enter a new Mario world, apparently with Yoshi too, and couldn’t wait to see the wonders that were awaiting me but instead what awaited me was a load of falling blocks and a Mario that didn’t jump but instead spun around, moving plates from left to right... I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Is this a mini-game before the main adventure? Is this some sort of weird training like the start of DK 64? I slowly realised that no... this was the entire game. How could they make a whole game about flipping plates around?! I was about to find out.

Mario & Yoshi sets you the task of getting the highest score possible in two ways, either the traditional sense by matching falling tiles together before they stack too high or by hatching Yoshi which is done by first placing the bottom half of an egg and then landing the top half of the egg when that comes into the set of falling blocks.

Unlike most puzzlers, the action takes place at the bottom of the screen as you’re tasked with moving the stacks of blocks into the correct position for the falling blocks to land on as oppose to the usual way of moving the falling blocks in line with what has already been accumulated on the bottom of the screen.

As far as puzzle games go it’s very simple, but then it’s an early Gameboy game and does seem as though it was intended as a kind of ‘My First Puzzle Game’, so it was almost fate that I stumbled upon it and its plate swapping ways.

Whilst initially horrified on that car journey all those years ago, had I not been trapped in that vehicle and held at gunpoint with the option of either persevering with this puzzler or staring blankly out of the window (in the dead of night, no less) then I may not have forced myself to play for very long and would have discarded it. As it happens though, after half an hour of plate swapping, a switch flicked in my mind. My pathetic initial attempts now a long lost memory, I was starting to get quicker, flipping plates far ahead of time, planning my Yoshi hatches, pulse racing at my ever climbing score and... God damn, I was playing a puzzler and having fun! Before a world of wine and cheese, well, Babybel and Lambrini, this was the height of sophistication.

In what felt like 10 minutes, the usual endless holiday drive was over. Where did all the time go? Was I in some sort of trance? Well, kind of - one of the most enjoyable things about puzzle games is getting in the zone and falling into almost a form of meditation as things so peacefully match up and disappear. My initial hatred had turned into love and I was obsessed with matching falling blocks and hatching Yoshi. I’d close my eyes and there they were, eggs just waiting to be fused together, ghosts ready to be blasted into nothingness, plates just waiting to be flipped.

Mario & Yoshi turned into more than just a time-waster for the car ride and I played it for a good few months, finally beating my friends score and boasting proudly to him before the slightly disappointing reply of “oh that’s cool, I don’t really like it though so only played a few times”. Yeah, whatever, only a few times? More like “hey, I’m a bitter lemon”.

Mario & Yoshi doesn’t hold up that well today, it’s passable for sure, but far too simple for the seasoned puzzle master. One thing it does have going for it is its unique gameplay, as even now, I can’t think of a puzzle game that plays quite like this one. It was available as part of the Famicom 30th Anniversary, so I picked it up again on the Wii U Virtual Console for 30p – At that price it’s a justifiable purchase but anything more and you’d be better off staring out of a car window and eating Babybel.

Whilst Mario & Yoshi may not be the greatest puzzle game in the world, it did do something vastly important – It was a simple and easy to learn title that got me into the whole puzzle genre. Whilst I wouldn’t play that many in the immediate following years, at the birth of the DS I suddenly grew into an obsessive puzzle player, and to this day it’s probably one of my favourite genres.

With titles such as Polarium, Meteos, Tetris DS, Picross, Zoo Keeper and many more, I had a world of tile flipping ahead of me, and as such, in the following weeks, I have a world of feverishly typing about those wonders ahead of me but for now, I have some hatching to do.