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SONY have a knack of grabbing the right licences at the right
time. In this generation alone, we’ve seen Prince
Of Persia: Sands Of Time, Beyond Good & Evil and The
Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The
 Witch And The Wardrobe
delayed for both the GameCube and Xbox in order for the PlayStation2
to grab the Christmas hype. Now, hot-off-the-mark, SONY have managed
to produce a title based on a new craze in popular-culture,
something to compete with that blasted Crazy Frog Racer, you
could say.
GO! Sudoku has launched on the PSP with an eye to
scoring well while the Sudoku craze lasts over the Christmas period.
Entering the field as the PSP’s first official budget title, SONY
certainly seem to have the right idea when it comes to the
mainstream market. Featuring one thousand puzzles with many more
downloadable, GO! Sudoku is offered on the PSP with a slight
grin towards the almighty Tetris.
The puzzle game in itself remains entirely intact. Choosing
your difficulty will vary both how many chances you get to make a
mistake and the amount of numbers present in the grid before play,
as well as the Time Penalty incurred for every misplaced number. The
puzzle is simply to place the numbers one through nine into a 9x9
grid, insuring that every column, every row and every internal 3x3
grid only contains  each number once. The popular pastime seems a
little blithe to begin with, with the only challenge involving
beating the suggested time. Placing the numbers is simply a case of
checking top to bottom, left to right and the 3x3 grid to make sure
the placement doesn’t double a number. Later numbers fall into
place in the grid with very little difficulty and the challenge
never seems to pass the level of comfortable.
In addition, the difficulty curve is lessened even further by
the fact that misplaced pieces may loose you a Life, but once your
Lives have diminished, you can continue to play simply adding the
aforementioned Time Penalty. The two other gameplay modes offer
little more than a High-Score competition – Pass Sudoku and
Wireless Sudoku are merely examples of competing in terms of time
and the lowest count of mistakes. The disc also supports the PSP’s
Game Sharing functionality by allowing a paltry five puzzle demo to
be downloaded.
In terms of presentation, GO! Sudoku prides itself on
it’s inherently SONY arrangement. Every Menu is clear-cut and 
glossy, while all the puzzle’s backdrops are active without ever
distracting you from the task at hand. Burning flames, star-lit
nights and water effects are all nice-and-well, but GO! Sudoku
has a major failing with regards to its appearance on the PSP –
it’s not a videogame. Yes, there are many examples of Puzzle games
which made their play without the use of a backlit screen and a 333
MHz Processor later to appear on games consoles, but GO! Sudoku
raises its head at a point in which the industry is moving its
handheld developments away from Tech Demo-esque romps and titles
with only one-dimension. It couldn’t necessarily have been
developed any other way, but surely – especially with the likes of
Nintendo’s Brain Training arriving in the UK soon – this is the argument in which GO! Sudoku proves its
lack of inherent worth for the industry.
Surprisingly enough, GO! Sudoku raises quite a bizarre
question graphically. Everything is presented to the highest
standard with little confusion caused by either the Menu System or
the in-game set-up. However, whilst the backdrops are pleasant and
the pen-and-paper presentation is reflected well on-screen, it’s
not exactly doing, well, anything… The sound is much of a
nothingness also. Without offering anything inherently wrong, GO!
Sudoku certainly hasn’t delivered its own equivalent to the Tetris
Theme Tune.
For all it’s slick presentation and delivery on each of the
PSP’s wireless features competently, GO! Sudoku still
simply feels out-of-place in an industry where we’ve seen
intuitive, original Puzzle titles such as Zoo Keeper, Archer
Maclean’s Mercury, Polarium and Meteos all
released within the last eight months on the handheld competitors. GO!
Sudoku doesn’t particularly do anything wrong, simply becoming
part of the games industry without either updating the formula or
even at least adding a few extra features/gameplay modes, it failed
before it began.
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