Consolation Prize

Sudoku was a bit of a craze a few years ago. At one stage it seemed like I couldn’t even turn on the TV without some minor celebrity promoting their Sudoku book or harping on about how good it was. Thankfully the celebs have been and gone (and probably made a pretty penny or two out of it in the process) and the craze has subsided. Buku Sudoku, for the Xbox 360, is a little bit late to the party but it does a decent job of wrapping up the logic based number puzzler into an interesting package with great presentation and configurable difficulty levels that should appeal to fans old and new alike.

For those not in the know Sudoku is pretty straight forward to play once you’ve learned the fundamentals. The player is presented with a grid, most typically 9 x 9, which is partially filled with numbers from 1 to 9. The aim is to ensure that each column and row contains the digits 1 to 9, in addition the grid is split into regions (nine 3 x 3 regions in this example) which must also contain the digits 1 to 9. However the numerics in each row, column and region must be unique i.e. appear just the once in that row, column or region. It’s a simple principle but guaranteed to give your brain cells a bit of a workout.

The single player game is broken into “Casual” or “Timed” modes and the player can choose from four different grid sizes (6×6, 8×8, 9×9 and 12×12) and three difficulty levels (easy, medium or hard). The size of the grid partly governs the difficulty but also determines the numbers used, for example a 6 x 6 grid uses the digits 1 to 6 and so forth. The exception to this rule is the 12 x 12 grid which also introduces the letters “A”, “B” and “C”. Finally the difficulty level determines how many “givens” (static numbers already placed on the grid) you commence the game with, the more “givens” the easier it will be to work out missing numbers. The ability to mix and match the grid size and difficulty level affords the player a great deal of flexibility, thus the player can quite easily dip into Buku Sudoku for a quick five minute game or alternatively try out a real mind bender.

Presentation wise Buku Sudoku looks as good as it can get for a game which is, after all, just a series of numbers on a grid. The developers have had the foresight to include a variety of themes, backgrounds and interface configuration options which allow the player to customise the look and feel as they please. They’ve also done a good job with the menu screens, which could quite easily have been very bland, but instead they’re nicely presented in an academia like style using graph paper and objects to mimic a student’s desk.

The actual user interface is easy enough to use. Moving around the grid and selecting numbers, or “pencilling” in possible numbers, is a doddle using a combination of the left joystick for grid movement, right joystick for number selection and then either the “A” or the “X” button respectively. The background music is however not completely to my tastes but fortunately this can be muted.

In principle Buku Sudoku sounds rather dull, but it’s actually rather quite addictive and an easy going enjoyable game with which to whittle away some spare time. There are of course a plethora of other ways to play Sudoku, especially if you’ve got a DS, PSP or PC, but for 360 owners this is the only option you’ve got and fortunately its competently done.

Buku Sudoku is available for 800 Microsoft Points from Xbox Live Marketplace, is 47MB to download and contains 1200 puzzles.

I’ve got to be sure my wife doesn’t find out there is sudoku on the 360 or she’ll be on there all the time.

Hehe Yeah once you’re hooked on Sudoku it certainly is hard to break the addiction.