Astraware Sudoku: another addictive game for your Palm

I have to admit it, I'm not that much into Palm gaming nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I love games, and had plenty installed in previous models (altough I only played regularly some of them, not all), but my Treo made me an "online junkie", so when I have some spare time, I usually check my E-mail, read some RSS feeds, chat or surf a little, instead of performing a more "offline" task like... playing! :-) Still, there are many great games for the PalmOS platform, and they keep on coming.

Case in hand, I took Astraware Sudoku for a spin. I imagine that, by now, all PalmAddict readers know what Sudoku is. According to Wikipedia, the game was invented in 1979 (in its modern form) and only recently (2005) became well-known worldwide, an addictive game that first took the UK by storm. Basically, it is a 9x9 square composed by nine 3x3 squares. In each line and column, numbers from 1 to 9 can be written, but only once. And there lies the secret. You start Sudoku with a few numbers already laid out, and it's up to you, knowing this basic rule, to figure out the remaining numbers.

I always enjoyed mind games, more so in my Palm, since I believe that they are more challenging, more interesting, easier to pause and restart later, and less stressful on the buttons (some arcade Palm games were known to cause potential damage to your PDA's buttons if you played too seriously for too long). So, having read about Sudoku and checked (but not played) a few "paper versions" before, I was curious to see what all the fuss was about.

After playing for - ahem - quite some time, I can truly say that I now understand the addiction. This is truly a WONDERFUL game! And let me tell you that most of the thrill comes from Astraware's interface! I cannot imagine myself playing Sudoku on a sheet of paper. With Astraware Sudoku, I can easily annotate in each box all the numbers that I believe may be "the one". The GUI is very user-friendly and intuitive: the horizontal numbers are the "possible ones", and you just have to first select a box and pick the possible numbers to fill it; the vertical numbers are the "certain ones", and selecting a box and picking one is all you need to do.

Something I LOVE about the electronic version is that I know ON THE SPOT if I guessed it right (blue number) or not (red number) when picking from the vertical list. Some may say this allows for some "heavy cheating", but you will only be fooling yourself, just like looking at the answers when doing a crossword puzzle! I rarely had it wrong, and not once "took a wild guess" just because I knew the game would tell me if I had it right or not. When I guessed wrong, it was because I overlooked some number that was not a possibility, or that I had forgotten. Hey, I'm entitled to a few mistakes, okay? :-)

If you have a Treo, the icing on the cake is the fact that you can play the game from start to finish from your keyboard, never using the stylus, simply WONDERFUL! This is normally how I play it: the center button switches from "possible" to "certain" (giving you an audible feedback), the D-pad allows you to travel top to bottom, left to right inside the 9x9 grid, and the numerical pad allows you to directly enter the numbers.

Astraware still wasn't satisfied, though, so they designed a game where you can create your own Sudoku grids and download fresh ones from a special website. How about that? That's enough Sudoku for me to last for years to come! Will my Treo 650 stand the pressure? :-)

Kudos to Astraware! They have created yet another addictive title for the PalmOS platform.