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HomeToys & GamesSudoku Mania |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 34 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
58 of 58 found the following review helpful:
 Worst Sudoku Game we've Played Oct 29, 2006
By Lisa Shea
"medieval swordfighting enthusiast"
We have tested quite a number of Sudoku handheld games, both for the DS and PSP. My boyfriend is a Sudoku addict! I honestly have to say that Sudoku Mania is the *worst* of anything we have tried.
You can chose a few options - the difficulty of the puzzle, the number of items per grid (2x2, 3x3) and solving with numbers or symbols. You also choose the theme of your puzzle, which change the look and feel of the game. Then you launch into the automatically generated puzzle.
The layout they chose to use is simply awful. The top display shows the puzzle. The bottom area has four TINY arrows that you can click on to move your "selection cube" up, down, left or right. You have to click precisely to move your cursor around. So you're watching the top screen and clicking in tiny spots on the bottom screen to position your cursor to the cube you want to work on. Yes, you can use the D-Pad as well.
Once you select a spot, you use the stylus to tap ONE NUMBER to put into that cube. You can't put in several numbers to indicate what you are currently working on!! Did the developers even play Sudoku before developing this game? No other game misses this most basic technique of playing Sudoku.
Oh, if you put an incorrect number in - where the number is already in a row or column - it flashes. So much for using your brain to solve the puzzle. Not that you really can solve some of these puzzles - their autogenerator seems to have faults and not all games are intuitively solvable.
All of these issues would already have put this game at the bottom of the list, but even their font choices are poor! Looking at the grid, some of the numbers look like other numbers. The contrast is poor so it's hard to see any of them. Again, these are basic issues that really should have been fixed. It's rather obvious that these guys were out to capitalize on the Sukoku mania and figured that once someone bought the game because it said "Sudoku", they'd be unable to return it.
With all the other Sudoku games out on the market, there's really no reason to get this one.
Rating: 1/5
29 of 29 found the following review helpful:
If you're looking for Sudoku for DS, look elsewhere ... Oct 19, 2006
By paulinpaloalto
"computer geek"
I bought this game after playing the sudoku in Brain Age and I am very disappointed
with Sudoku Mania. The overall quality of the implementation is really shoddy,
especially when compared to Brain Age. Just to point out a few of the major
limitations:
The user interface is really primitive. You can't use the stylus to navigate.
No handwriting recognition (a nice feature of Brain Age).
The font they use for the numbers is very hard to read (e.g. 3's and 8's are
almost indistinguishable).
There's no way to take notes about the potential possible numbers that
are valid in a given square (this is one of the great features of the
Brain Age sudoku).
It appears that they generate puzzles that have multiple solutions, which,
according to my understanding of sudoku, is not copacetic. What's the point
if you have to guess?
Trust me, buy Brain Age, not this turkey!
20 of 20 found the following review helpful:
How can I get my money back? Mar 09, 2007
By Jessica E. Bowen
This is an awful game! I bought it because I've finished all the Sudoku puzzles that came with Brain Age. I'll have to go play them again, because I just wasted $9.99 on this junk.
The worst part is that there's no way to enter possible solutions. You can have either a blank square or a number, that's it.
I also only played for a short while and was too frustrated to continue, but the puzzles on the difficult level do not appear solvable - and I'm a pretty good player.
I have a version for my PDA that lets you choose colors instead of numbers and I love that feature, so I thought I'd like the different themes on this game, but they're just really annoying.
I also think the touch screen programming is off. When you click on an item, sometimes it works and sometimes it acts as though you touched something else. I haven't noticed this on my other DS games, so I assume it's shoddy programming.
This game is TERRIBLE!
12 of 12 found the following review helpful:
Just say no Oct 17, 2006
By J. Raven
I bought hoping that the random puzzle generation would keep it interesting; unfortunately the generator, much like the rest of the program, is a disaster. For brevity's sake, rather than list out every single defect I'll just focus on the two most significant issues:
1) There's no form of annotation -- no way to mark for yourself which numbers have been eliminated as possibilities. So be prepared to drag along some paper with you.
2) The generator produces malformed puzzles. The whole point of sudoku is that there should be ONE solution to the puzzle, and your goal is to reason it out. The designers evidently thought differently, since the puzzle generator often creates puzzles with multiple acceptable solutions. So actually reasoning out a solution is often impossible, and you end up needing to make some random choices.
11 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Not a DS Game Sep 11, 2006
By J. Chuang
"This is a really really long nickname entered by me with Yongtao looking over my shoulder and see where this will be cut 01234567890123456789012345678"
The biggest limitation of this game: You HAVE to navigate the grid using the D pad, and not with the stylus. If you have played Sudoku, you know you're jumping all over the screen. Imagine having to click-click-click all the way to a open space. This feels like a quick port from another platform, rather than a DS game.
Don't waste your money on this one.
See all 34 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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