On August 1, 2008, iLounge published iPhone Gems: Every Sudoku Game, Reviewed, a feature article looking at 23 different Sudoku releases for the iPhone OS. This review focuses on Game Pack Vol 1 – Sudoku, Wordfind and PictureFlip ($5) by On-Core; you can read the full article, with screenshots of all of the games together, through the link above. A collective screenshot below shows you some of the other Sudoku interfaces you can expect to find in these titles.
If you’re reading this article, you probably already know that Sudoku is a one-screen puzzle game based upon a 9-by-9 grid that’s partially filled with numbers. The objective is to fill the empty spaces of the grid with single digit numbers so that the same digit does not appear twice on any horizontal or vertical line.
Additionally, the same number should not appear twice in any of nine 3-by-3 mini grids on the screen.
iLounge’s top-ranked Sudoku games are ones that offered fully-functional renditions of the game, with impressive interfaces, bonus features, user customization, and pricing as of the time we tested them. The fewer of these features a given game had, the lower it rated. While updates to these games may well be released over time, and their features may change, we couldn’t wait around forever for bad or so-so titles to catch up with ones that were already good or great.
Game Pack Vol 1 actually provides three different games in a single application. In addition to a simple version of Sudoku, you also get Wordfind—a clone of the newspaper puzzle Wonderword—and PictureFlip, which takes photos from your collection and scrambles them into tiles that need to be shifted to re-form the original image. The silent Sudoku title has a static background with static tiles, a pop-up window to insert new numbers, and an annotate feature to let you make guess marks. Three levels of difficulty are included.
On the merits of its Sudoku title alone, Game Pack Vol 1 would be nothing to write home about.
