Game Reviews

Sudoku

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| Sudoku (iPod)
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Sudoku
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| Sudoku (iPod)

The problem with converting sudoku to any mobile device, be it a phone, a DS, or an iPod, is that the result can never be as user-friendly as scribbling numbers on a newspaper page.

That said there are advantages, such as instant deletion that our grubby rubber can't match. Plus the chance to take helpful hints when you get stuck, without having to ask random strangers on the train to give you a clue.

Sudoku is the latest iPod game from EA Mobile, which is clearly well in with Apple, having also released Tetris, Mini Golf, Mahjong, and Royal Solitaire for the format. It's a polished incarnation that will delight fans of the Japanese puzzle craze.

Of course, there's little you can do to tweak sudoku without spoiling it, so EA has sensibly settled for producing a solid core game, with excellent presentation and nifty stat-tracking features.

At the start, you're presented with four difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Very Hard. Play for long enough, and you'll unlock a fifth: Insane.

But before launching into the game, you'll want to go to the Options menu and check out the control methods. Sudoku gives you two options, 'scrolling' and 'four-way touch', and you can also choose to use both. The four-way touch mode is the important one though, since it gets around the problems of using the iPod's scroll wheel for games that involve navigating around a grid – problems such as those that bedevilled Bejewelled.

Here, you can move up, down, left and right by simply touching (NOT pressing) the relevant direction on the scroll-wheel. It works well, and means you can still press the Menu button to bring up the in-game menu – something Apple has clearly made a requirement for all iPod game developers. Good work, EA fellas!

Once onto a sudoku grid, it's standard fare. You can input numbers by pressing the central button, and then scrolling/moving through a list of 1 to 9. Not sure about a square? Simply hold the button down for a long press, and you'll switch to pencil mode, where you can jot down possibles as you would on a pen'n'paper version. It's quick and easy to learn.

The visuals do the job well, and there's some lovely looking Oriental scenery in the background to admire. As you complete puzzles, you earn 'journey points', which don't affect the gameplay but do open up new scenery.

Meanwhile, the music isn't too intrusive, although half the point of playing an iPod game is to have your own tunes playing in the background, so chances are you won't listen to it often.

A neat touch is Newspaper Mode, which lets you enter a sudoku puzzle from, yes, your newspaper, and then either play it on the iPod, or cheekily get the iPod to solve it for you. Although if you're genuinely tempted to choose the latter option, you should take a long, hard look at how you're spending your train journeys.

Sudoku on iPod is about as polished and playable as you could expect. It's great to see Apple finally releasing some new iPod games after months of silence since the nine launch titles. And it's even better to see that they're as good as this pretty puzzler.

Sudoku

Great version of Sudoku that laughs in the face of any iPod scroll-wheel control issues
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Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)