I own a Nintendo DS, the limited edition red DS system they released with Mario Kart DS. I love my DS. I love the color, that solid, vibrant red. It looks classy, not girlie or gay as Marc Klein called it at last year’s Shore Leave.
It’s funny. I may have scoffed at the idea of the DS before its release (and I did), and I may have wondered why anyone would want what’s basically a souped up GameBoy with a touchscreen, but now I think it’s a nifty piece of engineering. Moreover, for all the time I’ve spent around video games I spend shockingly little time playing video games, except for my DS. I won’t say I have a great DS library, because I don’t. But what I do have, I like.
Like Sudoku.
I’m not sure when I noticed Sudoku puzzles in the newspaper. I’m not sure when I noticed books of sudoku puzzles in the bookstores. I do remember that I always thought sudoku was weird. What’s the appeal? Fill in the boxes with numbers? Huh? What?
Over the summer Nintendo released a sudoku game for the DS. It was inexpensive–just twenty dollars–so I had to investigate.
As I’d never even thought about attempting a sudoku puzzle in the newspaper I had no idea how to play. Fortunately the game came to my rescue, and it took me through a brief tutorial. Figure out what the number is, write it on the screen. Simple. The basics down, I went to town. 🙂
And I discovered that I was very good at sudoku. Decently fast, and very accurate. I can’t solve a Rubik’s Cube, but sudoku puzzles are nothing.
It’s what I play, like every day. Sudoku on my Nintendo DS. Sometimes one puzzle. Sometimes three or four. Keeps the brain sharp, so they tell me. No mad cow disease here.
I know there are other games I could play on my DS. But I’m happy with sudoku. I wonder if sudoku is happy with me…. 😉
I tried one of them in the plane magazine when I visited my folks. Very addicting.
Sudoku is very, very left-brain; there are no grays. It’s really a brilliant concept, and I love it.
I’m much faster with pen’n’paper sudoku’s, having been lured to them by my 80 year old mother…
Then the chap showed me Brain-Training on the DS. He never dares arrive at the house without his DS now, having also got me hooked on Animal Crossing and now Zoo Keeper.
The DS, he claims, is a girly console in that a non-console person like me (and his mother) will play on it for hours. Hours.
:holmes:
They hold weekly Sudoku anonymous meetings in the basement of the local baptist church…
And since it is in a church, I have not been to one of them. 👿
But yeah, it is VERY addictive and mind numbing and yet, gets the juices flowing. I use to do two or three online at work, while trying to figure out some things. (Take the attention away from the problem and lets the brain work on it in the background..)