ACWW is not the only game for me. Next up, Sudoku!?!

(tags game, DualScreen, puzzle, review, Emacs, Ruby, programming, failure)

I was finally bitten by the Sudoku (数独) bug. I can't remember my first encounter, but my initial "serious" foray included playing around with it in Emacs (M-x sudoku) and trying to write a solver in Ruby. One of my (what I consider a) "non-gamer" friends mentioned how she likes the game and how her programmer dad wrote his own solver. I always thought that the real challenge was the programming a solver and that doing the puzzle by hand was the "dumb human" approach. But in the hobby programming I just set up the data structures and I didn't have a clue as to how to solve an arbitrary board. In other words, my program problem-solving-fu is weak.

Which brings me to the DS version of Sudoku by Hudson Soft. I was at the local Sofmap trying to see if there was a download demo of the New Super Mario Bros. I played the latter at a special kiosk but I wanted to play it some more (in a word, wow!). I played some other interesting demos which I forgot the names. One was some light-gun like shooting game which made me want to buy it for a brief second. Another was some abstract ecology-life sim game where you can draw your own shapes for the "animals" and feed them to other animals, while going up the food chain. There didn't seem like much to that latter game, but I spent 20 minutes playing one level to see if there was.

So there wasn't any New Super Mario Bros, but aww heck, the previous wifi-downloaded demos were pretty fun, so let's give Sudoku a try. And try I did. I played one game and couldn't stop. I had to play another board. The second board in the demo was another "easy" level. I played that too. It took me about 50 minutes to finish the contents of that demo and I was totally sold on it. I went back inside the game shop and secured my own copy.

And that is how I spent the next 6 hours (non-contiguous) on Sudoku. Oh my. I suppose I understood the mechanics of trying to solve it, but I didn't understand the delightful feeling of satisfaction of following the puzzle-solving logic until now. You count out the numbers, see if anything is open, filling something which in turn gives more information about another box, etc etc. Wow the fun of Sudoku is understanding the physical constraints and the item (row, column, 3 by 3 group) constraints, figuring out the implications, etc. Hahah, and I thought "dumb humans" couldn't get any enjoyment out of this kind of task. I even reached an epithany of sorts when the game took on a "leap-of-faith" guessing aspect.

I suppose my review of the game itself is written above. Here are my thoughts on the DS implementation with plus and minus evaluation:

• + 300 boards from easy (70), regular (140), to difficult (90) difficulty.
• + It allows you to "scribble in crib notes" and notes display is fontified-clean but really small (3 by 5 pixel?). Initially I thought this is enough but there were times I wanted to write more.
• + Your guesses are colored dark gray which is different from the initial board. The crib notes are in red. The top screen of the DS doesn't have these notes, so it good for a clear view.
• + Save your current game with all notes intact. Only one game can be saved.
• + Records your completion time for each board.
• + By far the best part of this implementation is the highlighting of the numbers. Turn on the highlighting mode by pressing the L or R buttons, and the boxes that affect/are affected by this boxes are shown. Double tap a box with a number in it and the same number is highlighted on the screen (kinda like Emacs Incremental Search) Maybe it's "cheating" but I use this all the time. Ah my eyes.
• + Multi-level undo and redo for guesses. (Ignores notes)
• + I like how I can use the right hand side X Y A B buttons as another cursor pad. I'm not left-handed though so it's not necessary for me. Too bad you can't change the position of board and input area to furthur accomodate lefties.
• + There is handwriting recognition for the numbers but it not necessary. Besides tapping out the number is way better than less than perfect hand-rec. And it doesn't support a delete stroke (middle right to left stroke) that I was used to with the Decuma hand-rec.
• - It has three background songs but no option to turn them off. Sometimes I want to hear the effect sounds only, so this is a minus for me.
• + The color scheme of the boards can be altered and to me the schemes are attractive. I wish I could make my own color scheme, though.
• - You can't make your own puzzles, but then again that would be product "suicide". I suppose you can always go back to playing it on Emacs?
• + There's an expert timed game mode (段位認定), but I don't have enough recorded experience to unlock it. I wonder what it is and how "bronze", "silver", "gold" and "platinum" certs are going to burn me?

I think this implementation is very good. I suppose other touch-screen platforms have similar easy of use (crib notes, highlight, etc) but I haven't researched it. I just like the way I can use my left hand for moving the cursor and right hand for fill in/erase.

My board solving isn't very fast. It takes me on average 25 minutes to complete a board, on the easiest level. The fastest I cleared one was 12 minutes, but the worst was 50 minutes, ugh. My brain must be rotting from all those character goods shenanigans. I don't think I have the patience to solve all 300 puzzles (at least 125 hours?!!), but here's another DS game that I can show off other people to.