Incomplete Gamer

On a bang-for-your-buck basis, a PSP game I picked up last year might be the best value video game I’ve ever purchased. It certainly helped that the game, Go Sudoku!, had been marked down to $20. For the uninitiated, Go Sudoku! comes with 1000 of the numerical brain puzzlers with more available online for anyone who still wants more after they finish all one thousand of the challenges.

If the price of admission still sounds a little high you can always sample a free demo. Take your pick of the PSP demo (it’s the Japanese version titled ‘Kazuo‘) available here, or you can download a free Sudoku! demo from the Playstation Store. The game was created by Sumo Digital, who also ported the title across to the PS3. The PS3 version is the more bright and shiny of the two, outputting in all its 1080i glory, but really, there is little to separate the two.

Go Sudoku! has the kind of slick presentation that Lumines fans will appreciate, without any of that frenetic manipulation and without the funky beats. The music here is more new-age fare. You’re more likely to nod off than get your groove on, but together with the slick, earth, air, fire and water backdrops, it provides a similar transcendental experience, albeit of a more relaxing kind.

Each puzzle comes with a specified completion target time to aim for, a target I’ve been woefully unable to match to date, with most of my games clocking in at the twenty-minute mark. If your brain’s still agile then this is the perfect pick up and play experience. If like me, the wheels are turning a little slower, it’s more pick up and play…and play some more. You might think I’d become quicker with practice, but you must also allow for the law of diminishing returns to kick in around puzzle number 20. Basically, each puzzle will become slightly less enjoyable than the one before. That, coupled with an ever increasing level of difficulty, will pretty much ensure my average game time won’t move far below its current level. Even if we cut my average time in half to ten minutes, I’m still staring down the barrel at 10,000 minutes to play through the game, and that’s without downloading more of the buggers. 500 minutes of game play for $1 isn’t to be sneezed at.

Some of us rent to see if a game’s worth buying, the rest of us rent and play the entire game.

You know, there are a few often overlooked advantages at not excelling at video games. Yes, it’s a bummer if you can never reach that first save point, even with the walk- through in front of you. Sure it’s frustrating and a bad omen, when you’re having trouble inputting your name into the profile screen because the controls are so unintuitive and you settle for ‘AAA’, not because you’re lazy but because you simply can’t enter anything else.

But the opposite has its bad points too. Seriously, video gaming mastery has its drawbacks. We’ve all read the reviews, where the writer tells us how many hours it will take to play through the game in its entirety and frowns upon any game that serves up anything less than ten hours. Imagine being that good that you’re blowing through games so damn quick. You know, it’s like that office smart arse who reckons he can drive Sydney to Canberra door-to-door in less than two hours. It’s not so much you don’t believe him, but, hell, it’s a meaningless figure for the rest of us not driving a performance vehicle and without the means to pay the pricy and inevitable speeding fines.

Perhaps we need something more meaningful when measuring the hours it will take to play through a title. We’re not all video gaming gods. For us mere mortals a ten-hour play through simply means we may well actually complete the game sometime this calendar year. Averaging a puzzle a day, Go Sodoku! is likely to provide me three years of enjoyment. I’ll drop you a line in 2010 when I clock it.

Excerpts from this article were first published on the 12th of June 2006 by PALGN in the weekly column The Wrap (#16)