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Dr. Sudoku is as advertised — a GBA game of sudoku puzzles. Lots of puzzles — 1000, plus a few slots for your own designs. (Why “Dr.”? It’s hard to tell, but it seems to have something to do with “I’ve got a fever for sudoku, and I need the Doctor!” or something of the sort.)

For the uninitiated, a standard sudoku puzzle is a 9x9 grid, in which the numbers 1 through 9 should occur once (and only once) in every row, column, and 3x3 subgrid. The puzzle begins with a few numbers filled in (about a quarter to a third of the total), and your job is to complete the grid. For those who find 9x9 too easy, 16x16 puzzles are starting to appear, with hexadecimal A-F for the additional numerals.

Dad has been playing sudoku for about nine months, and the kids have joined in from time to time. Occasionally, we copy a puzzle to a marker board and work it together … yes, we’re raising a family of geeks. But at least we haven’t tried any of the 16x16’s yet.

Dr. Sudoku has two modes, Normal and Original. In Normal mode, you can select any of 1000 puzzles (evenly divided among Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard). When working a puzzle, you can fill in a box, or you can switch to “memo” and place up to four itsy-bitsy numbers (3x5 pixels) in a box as a reminder of possible answers.

Use the D-pad to move the flashing box outline to the box you want to fill, then press A. A 3x3 grid of numbers appears; D-pad to the number you want to fill the box, then press A again. Dr. Sudoku won’t let you fill a box with an illegal number (but a number can be legal and still wrong … you just won’t know until you get farther into the puzzle).

The puzzle grid itself fills about 60% of the screen. On the right is a help system — press R to reach it, then D-pad to a specific number (in another 3x3 grid) to highlight all occurrences of that number in the puzzle, and even to mark which additional boxes can take that number. Press L to get back to the puzzle. It also has a good tutorial that explains how sudoku works.

Original mode is for designing puzzles. You can start placing numbers in an empty grid yourself, or you can press Auto Fill to fill the grid legally, then remove numbers until you’re happy with the design.

Will likes the part where you can make up your own puzzles. (He’s usually happier constructing something of his own than playing what someone else has designed.) He tried designing one on paper, but keeping track of all the number placements that are legal/illegal is real hard to do on paper. Dr. Sudoku’s design mode won’t let you place an illegal number.

He actually likes working puzzles on paper or the marker board more than with the GBA, with one major exception — Dr. Sudoku won’t let you place an illegal number, so it avoids some major screw-ups (especially if you don’t notice the illegal number until you’ve filled another five or ten boxes). Otherwise, it seems like to him, the larger the board, the more fun it is to work puzzles.

Jesse likes working the puzzles better than designing them, although he’s done some of both. He’s playing through the Very Easy puzzles right now. He prefers the GBA to puzzles on paper, because it lets you know when you’ve placed an illegal number. He’s even tried a few designs on his own, but designing a workable puzzle can be pretty difficult. (More on this, later.)

Dad jumped to the last Very Hard puzzle (of course). It took him about 45 minutes to work it, which is about the same as newspaper puzzles rated at the highest difficulty. However, a sampling of Medium, Hard and Very Hard puzzles all took him about the same time — 30 to 50 minutes. As the most hard core sudoku puzzler in the family, he noted these comparisons between paper and Dr. Sudoku puzzles:

• Dr. Sudoku is a GBA game. That means a small screen, about 20% the size of most paper puzzles. Focusing and concentrating on such a small screen can be hard on the eyes, especially older eyes. The GBA is best paired with quick-moving, action games, not games that require long periods of consideration.
• Dad might not have even noticed the relatively small size, except for another standard feature of GBA games — flashing lights. At all times, a bright red outline is pulsing around one of the 9x9 boxes to mark your cursor location. And (for some reason) there is always a pulsing green arrow to remind you of the help feature. The flashing red outline can be reduced to a much smaller size by switching to memo mode, but then you have to switch back out of memo mode each time you want to fill in a box. The small screen size and pulsing lights combined to create a tension headache for Dad each time he plays more than half an hour.
• Dr. Sudoku has music. Paper puzzles don’t. The music, with a nice, jaunty beat, is a lot like the flashing boxes and help light — it’s real distracting to Dad, who always turns it off. On the other hand, Will and Jesse are fine with the music, but don’t find it exceptional.
• Dr. Sudoku has only one save game. Two different players can’t be playing through the puzzles at the same time. Given how little memory it takes to track a player’s progress, this lack is, well, puzzling and a significant flaw for a family of game players.
• By far, Dr. Sudoku’s greatest advantage over paper sudoku puzzles is its can’t-make-an-illegal-move feature. However, it’s surprising that this isn’t paired with another equally useful feature — the ability to backtrack until you get back to where you started going wrong. If you realize you’ve placed a wrong number, you usually have no idea what other numbers you placed since then that should also be removed. It seems like it would have been easy (especially with two unused buttons) to allow a player to backtrack.

It will tell you if a puzzle you’ve designed is solvable or unsolvable. However, there are two reasons why a puzzle might be unsolvable, and they are very different reasons, requiring very different fixes. A puzzle must have a unique solution, so a puzzle with too little information isn’t solvable — you’ve got to add more numbers to fix it. A puzzle with too many numbers (basically, you’ve backed yourself into a corner so that no solution is possible) is also unsolvable, but in this case, the fix is to remove numbers. However, Dr. Sudoku doesn’t distinguish between these two problems, so if it tells you your design is unsolvable, you don’t know whether you need to add numbers or remove them.

Original mode does allow one other use that can be really nice. You can take a paper puzzle and input it as a design of your own. You can check to make sure it’s solvable (especially if you’ve been knocking your head on it for an hour or two and want assurance that the designer didn’t screw up) and then you can work it fresh (which is useful if you’ve scribbled all over the original paper version).

Our bottom line is that Dr. Sudoku is nice, but nowhere near as good a game as it could have been. It does a decent job of delivering a non-GBA-style game on the GBA, but it’s not at all exceptional. If you like playing on your GBA, and like puzzle games, it’s probably worth getting, but we certainly wouldn’t put it at the head of the line.