Pocket Gamer has posted a review of Sudoku for iPod, one of the more recent titles released for Apple's handheld media device. This version of the popular numbers game offers a variety of difficulty levels and the unique ability to enter a puzzle from a newspaper or magazine, which you can then solve yourself or let the iPod do the work for you. Pocket Gamer gave Sudoku a score of 8 out of 10.

From the review:

At the start, you're presented with four difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Very Hard. Play for long enough, and you'll unlock a fifth: Insane.

But before launching into the game, you'll want to go to the Options menu and check out the control methods. Sudoku gives you two options, 'scrolling' and 'four-way touch', and you can also choose to use both. The four-way touch mode is the important one though, since it gets around the problems of using the iPod's scroll wheel for games that involve navigating around a grid – problems such as those that bedevilled Bejewelled.

Here, you can move up, down, left and right by simply touching (NOT pressing) the relevant direction on the scroll-wheel. It works well, and means you can still press the Menu button to bring up the in-game menu – something Apple has clearly made a requirement for all iPod game developers. Good work, EA fellas!

Once onto a sudoku grid, it's standard fare. You can input numbers by pressing the central button, and then scrolling/moving through a list of 1 to 9. Not sure about a square? Simply hold the button down for a long press, and you'll switch to pencil mode, where you can jot down possibles as you would on a pen'n'paper version. It's quick and easy to learn.

Pocket Gamer: Sudoku Review

Apple: iPod Games

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