Between many sudoku puzzle generators online I will suggest SudokuArena.com with very nice graphics and patterns. Authors claims they've built much better algorithm in their sudoku generator than what is available around.
http://www.sudokuarena.com

I'm new to Sudoku games (only started doing them when I played Azada) so this game is perfect for me. It's challenging and beautiful. Thanks GGOTD!

My wife loves it! (personally i am not into Sudoku, card or puzzle games) Buku Sudoku made her very happy. :D Thanks, GGAOTD! :D

Love the game. Thanks so much. Double thumbs up. (I also look forward to WhiteRabbit's wonderful reviews.) It works well on my Vista Home Premium, also. #23, be sure to turn off the hints and it will be more challenging for you.

My first Merscom game and I love it!
Thanks GGOTD and Merscom
... and WhiteRabbit ;0 I too wait to see what you think before trying a new game. Plus you give me a grin occasionally with something you add in about family or something that happened once upon a time :)
Your hard work IS appreciated.

Thank you for this game today. The program downloaded and installed in about 10 minutes on my Windows XP. I am very new to the game, so this 'free' version is a great way for me to get in more practice! For a beginner like me, filling in/giving me number options is a great learning tool! Thank you so much!

Hi Mike comment #30, If I got paid for writing these reviews it would probably no longer be fun. I used to love photography till I worked as a photographer (many years ago now) which destroyed my love of it until recently with the advent of digital cameras and photoshop.


Thank you to everyone for the kind remarks; as every they are always appreciated. I would never expect anything for doing these reviews as 'doing ' them helps me to keep my mind active, which is payment enough.

Hi Karzon,
I think we were both wrong :oops: as it seems it was the work of a Swiss mathematician who developed the ideas of others. Though the name is Japanese . It consists of the Japanese characters Su (meaning 'number') and Doku (meaning 'single') Though I can see why you may have thought it was an American invention. Here's a small excerpt I quote from the English Daily mail who ran a small piece about the History of sudoku:

Quote:

If the name sounds Japanese, that's because it is: Sudoku came to this country from the puzzle-crazy Land of the Rising Sun.

Translated into English, 'Sudoku' - or 'Su doku' as some call it - means something like "Single Number".

Although Sudoku is a Japanese import, its roots lie in the work of an 18th-century Swiss genius. Leonhard Euler, who was born in Basle in 1707 and has been described as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

Plagued by eyesight problems that eventually led to blindness, Euler nevertheless produced formulas in every branch of mathematics, wrote 886 books and papers and also found the time and energy to father 13 children.

But the idea that is saluted every day, albeit unknowingly, by fans of Sudoku is Euler's "Latin Squares", which he introduced in 1783 as a "nouveau espece de carres magiques", which translates as "a new kind of magic squares".

This was a grid of equal dimensions in which every number or symbol occurs once in each row or column. It differs from the Sudoku grid only in that the latter is subdivided into blocks of nine.

Sudoku's modern worldwide vogue can be traced back to the early 1980s, when it appeared in an American puzzle magazine under the name of the "Number Place" game.

This was noted by the Japanese puzzle magazine publishers Nikoli. Its attraction was that it transcended language barriers and, in any case, Japanese does not lend itself to crosswords because of the nature of its alphabet. Nikoli copied the idea and introduced it to its readers in 1984.

It was such a hit that there are now five Sudoku magazines published in Japan each month, with a total circulation of 660,000.

The Sudoku name is registered as a trademark in Japan, so rivals run it under the original US name of Number Place

quote taken from an article by RICHARD PENDLEBURY, Daily Mail - 12th May 2005

Whiterabbit.
Superb, mate.
You should be on the payroll!

Re Whiterabbit aka Stephen #3 - Sudoku is NOT Japanese, it was invented by an American under the name "number place" and wasn't introduced to Japan until later.

Re #11 "Mark": There are a lot of us gamers here who will not d/l a game until we read "W'rabbits" post of the day. I, for one, really appreciate the time and effort it takes to put one of those posts together. I also appreciate the in depth review and pics.

I would suggest if you don't, then just skip reading them. "W'rabbit" makes those posts stand out so you can find, or skip, them easily.

Just my $.02 worth for today.

Thanks Whiterabbit for all your effort (reviews & in forums),

T_B_L

#11 - If you don't care for a comment, scroll through it or ignore it!!!

This is what I was going to do with yours but I want to add my appreciation and admiration for Whiterabbit's comments. His comments always help me decide if a game is worth downloading or not. Today, I was going to pass but his great description of the game made me try it and I'm very glad I did. It's a keeper.

As for only being kids on this site, I'm sure we're all "kids at heart" but a lot (if not most) of us are adults, thank you very much!

I love Sudoku, have books all over the house, in both cars & in my purse. So.....thank you once again GGOTD! This version is ok, I don't care for the music except in the underwater mode, but I'll add my own...might need your help on that, Stephen (Whiterabbit). I do wish you could put "pencil marks" in cells like #12 said, but for free.... I'll live with it. Anyway, I give this one a thumbs up.

I like Sudoku so I'll be grabbing this one! Thanks GGOTD!

Very nice game. Works great on my vista home premium. A comment about the game itself - I wish it would let me put my own selection of numbers in each square. When it gives you the only options available, it makes the game way too easy. That's half the fun - figuring out which numbers could go in a certain box.

sorry that was #11's statement about which I was commenting....(sorry #5!)

I love this program, WISH I had a laptop so I COULD take it on a plane.
I laugh at #5's statement; white rabbit is GREATLY appreciated(as he knows from all of our comments other times)
His reviews are excellent and I applaud the hard work that goes into the detail discussion of each game.
It is always his review I check first to determine whether I would want the offered game of each day.
thanks again, white rabbit and keep up the great job!
#5..MANY of us are NOT kids, don't be so arrogant to think that only kids are interested in such a site.

The game setup went fine, but when I try to start the game, I get a message: "Cannot load configs".
I'll try reinstalling it and see what happens.

rw: As I noted in my review, it allows you to flag an "answer" as tentative. That's it, which is why I give thumbs down.

Downloaded great. cant seem to get it to play. no short cut and when i try to start it with the filr all i get is the set up. please help!

I can't tell by the pictures if there is a place for inputting possible answers for a square (which I find very helpful for more difficult puzzles and necessary for 16x16 puzzles) Many computer programs do not have that option. Does this one?

I love this game!! I've downloaded this before, but lost it because of a rebuild. I especially like the option of displaying possible answers in each square.

Buku, I've missed you!!

This was one of the first games I downloaded here and one of the best Sudoku computer games I have seen. For the sake of people who lost games to computer problems or are new here, I hope Game GAOTD and Merscom will repeat all the "Buku" games!
My thanks to Game GAOTD and Merscom for great games!

Just briefly - no thanks on the Buku Sudoku; I don't play those kinds of games.

However, regarding 'Mark's' comments on Whiterabbit - Stephen, please do not change anything about how you review games. Those of us with a functioning intelligent quotient over one hundred adore the time, work, and effort you put into sharing with us both your opinions and any options and alternatives you find both to the game itself and any problems we encounter. You provide a valuable service, and I for one want you to know that you ARE appreciated and you ARE enjoyed! You save me so much time, helping me decide ultimately whether a game is worth my effort and hard drive or if I'll just wait until a better offering comes along, and your honesty is never misplaced with my intellect, I can assure you.

Please don't take comments like the above ones personally; in the long run you are doing phenomenal things for people who actually can read and/or write more then fifty words AND incorporate accurate grammar and punctuation with them. ^.~ We love you, don't change a thing!

*^_^*

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, http://www.thestar.com/generic/article/261287 is a good online one that shows what I mean about marking possible entries. I like that one too, but it doesn't work on a plane. ;)

This sucked. Looked pretty (at a very low resolution) but the gameplay interaction was useless. The "hint" mode is all-or-nothing, which easily lets you see what is legal in each spot - not a "give me a clue in this one cell over here."

My biggest complaint is gameplay. There's no way to mark more than one possible number in a single cell. For example, with other systems (paper or software) you can say "this cell is a 2 or a 5" but this one you can only choose a number and then mark it yellow (with the right mouse button) as a maybe. That's useless when you get any more advanced than childish levels.

I've tried quite a few, and Snoodoku (free trial at snoodoku.com) is still the best one I've seen (and pretty cheap at $20).

as for this game and other Merscom games that I have tested on here have taken up to 4 minutes to setup slowing down my 3GHz Dell system and after uninstalling them my system is real sluggish for about an hour for some reason, hey Whiterabbit, your editorials are way to long and really boring after reading a few lines, do appreciate the editorial but since most people that come in here are kids are really not all that interested in such a long review, shortin them up a little

I downloaded this in June and I love it! Thanks again Merscom LLC for a great game.

The best I've personally used is SimpleSudoku, at
http://www.angusj.com/sudoku/

which is portable, uses only a couple megs, and doesn't worry about skins, etc. It has helped me solve and learn to solve at higher and higher levels.

Buko Sudoku may be all that and more, but it is way too bloat for a non-action game for me.

@Whiterabbit: Fantastic posting! Great work! Thanks a lot!!!

Works fine on Vista, shame the graphics are only 800 x 600 with no option to change them.

Already proposed, but I really love it :) It's a good game.

This game was previously given away 8-18-2007. The difficulty levels range from ridiculously simple to fiendishly difficult. Grids range from 4x4 to 16x16. There are options to create your own puzzles, and this feature can be used to solve the puzzles that have baffled you in the past.

Although it is a large download, it is definitely worthwhile for Sudoku lovers.

That's strange; I wasn't able to get access to the game giveaway project until nearly 40 minutes into the giveaway, but was able to log onto the giveaway project, so naturally assumed there was something wrong with the site. But looking at the comments above some were able to log on right away. Was there a problem? Did anyone else have a problem accessing the site?

Anon, comment #1, it's a 'good' version; well worth having as it's free for today and after checking loads of freeware ones for the review above, nothing I found touched it for quality, though Pure Sudoku was also quite reasonable with it's changeable bacgrounds and game play, though if I wasn't getting it for free I'd go for Gametops Imperial Sudoku which though not quite as 'nice' has most of the functions today's giveaway has and as an added bonus is totally free apart from the browser being opened when you close the game down.


There's a thread open in the games discussion section of the forums, so if you have any probles with installation, or just running the game do post your queries etc over there. Here's the link to the thread:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/2804?replies=1#post-19805

Buku Sudoku: A Review:


Background:

Sudoku is a puzzle of Japanese origin where logic is used to arrive at a solution. The Sudoku board is a lattice consisting of nine columns and nine rows and is divided into nine 3x3 boxes. Some squares will already have numbers from 1 to 9 in them; they are called clues. Your aim is to fill all the squares with numbers or letters. There is just one rule: Every row, column and box must contain all given nine numbers or letters. Each number or letter can be used only once in any column, row or box. Remember that there is only one possible way of solving.


Quote:

Experience the puzzle sensation that is sweeping the nation. Buku Sudoku offers countless hours of Sudoku puzzle games and even teaches you how to play. Generate countless puzzles using numbers, shapes, pictures, and symbols. Choose from themes like Ancient Japan, Underwater Paradise, and Tropical Rainforest. Create and solve any Sudoku puzzle even those found online and in newspapers. The most all-inclusive Sudoku game on the market, Buku Sudoku ships with a built-in tutorial, two game modes, three difficulty levels, a robust puzzle generator, as well as options that let you create games, display hints, highlight errors, undo moves, and solve puzzles

Introduction and Installation:

This was given away towards the end of June 07. It’s a 32.7Mb download that installs to nearly 70Mb. Most of this is spread between the three themes, A tropical rainforest an underwater paradise and a Japanese theme. You’ll find each theme has an accompanying music track. Each of these is located in the

There were 43 comments most of which were complimentary. You can see all of these by following the link below. The game scored 88% of 165 votes:

http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/buku-sudoku/#comment-17083



The Game



After installing you’ll need to create shortcuts. There’s a post in the forums that tells you how to do this, both for a desk top short cut and a start menu shortcut. Follow the link below to go to the shortcut tutorial:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/2594?replies=3


This is an excellent version of Sudoku, with a variety of themes:

Japanese
Tropical Rainforest
Underwater paradise

You can play the game as classic, without any time constraints or arcade, where you are timed. There is a good selection of grids from 4×4 to 16×16 and three levels of difficulty.

The tutorials and more information that are available via the main menu or the in game menu should give those that haven’t played this popular game enough information to get started. (Go to the link below to see the rules; however the tutorial session is only captured in part)

The ‘usual’ options menu contains music and sound toggles as well as windowed/full screen options. The latter is also available at all times from the buttons at the top right hand corner of the playing area. You can select which theme you want to play the game in (see above) or select random. There are three different ways of inputting the numbers or symbols; which you can see if you follow the link below to some captured in game images.


Ways of Inputting Numbers:


Scroll over
Pop up
Panel

The game board has several buttons that allow you to undo moves, show hints and/or errors as well as a solve function, which will slowly solve the puzzle to completion, unless you click on solve again; which stops the process. This will allow you to play the game from where you stopped the solve function. You can also save the game and return to it directly from the main menu.

A variety of screenshots showing the different styles you can play the game in as well as options menu, puzzle creator and Help menus amongst others. (18 in total).


Images – All on one page:


http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Buku%20Sudoku/?start=all

As a Slideshow:

http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Buku%20Sudoku/?albumview=slideshow


You should find the three styles of music complement the particular themes found in this game, though if you don’t find them entertaining enough it’s a relatively simple task to change the music files for something you prefer. The music is in the form of .ogg files, which seem to be the preferred format for in game music. If you’ve previously picked up an audio converter from the giveaway project it’s relatively easy to convert some of your favorite music to the .ogg format. All you have to do once you’ve converted the files is to rename them to the ones in the games OGG folder. (Which is really easy because they are called 1, 2 and 3). If you don’t have an audio converter then look no further than the giveaway projects Freeware library because you can get a couple of freeware audio converters that will convert your MP3’s, WMA and Wav files to .ogg:

MP3 WMA Converter:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/freeware/2007/08/30/free-mp3-wma-converter/


MP3 WMA WAV Converter:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/freeware/2007/07/30/free-mp3-wma-wav-converter/




The game is fully controlled by mouse movements which will be handy for those with poor keyboard control, or those who are disabled.


Conclusion


This is a great puzzle game that if used as part of a child’s computer time may promote numeracy. They should be able to cope with the smaller grids especially if it’s set to novice. I’ll certainly be trying this out again with my children over the next few days. Both need a little more help with their numeracy (just above average in school). I’m always on the look out for novel ways of being able to help my children with their education in a fun way.

The ability to make your own levels is a plus, however if you look at the two different versions of the game (ie Arcade and classic) you will see that there are several thousand combinations to play on each game; so, unless you’re a fanatic, I doubt the editor will get much use from me, though my son really loves any game with a levels editor. He’s already tracked down quite a large number of my games with editors attached and can quite happily spend a few weeks making levels for them, for example he’s made over 100 levels for the platform game Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery. I’ve found some of them quite hard to beat as well. He’s messed around with the Gish editor and even made a few levels for the Ricochet arkanoid. Back to the game, :lol: There’s also a function to capture the playing area and print it out, so that you can set paper versions of the game. That would have been great for anyone who commutes to work on the trains. :lol:

Although not one of my favorite games, this is worth 7 out of 10 at the very least. It’s well presented and has several options that change the game play for extended playability. This is one of those games that will always be a challenge and provided you don’t need to reinstall windows should provide years of enjoyment. If you miss or lose today’s game you can get it free for a year via Game tap; though you have to download their manager which has the usual adware attached. You do get access to a whole pile of commercial games that you get to play free until Dec 31st 2008, where I presume a whole new bunch will be added.

http://www.gametap.com/home/play/gameDetails/000409150


Thank you lots Merscom LLC and the Game Giveaway team for an excellent game.



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Alternatives

There are so many free Sudoku games to be found on the www now that it would have taken me all night and then some to check them all out. The ones I’ve linked to below were all found very quickly. Apart from the one from Game top, all the others are tagged as working in Vista. As for Imperial Sudoku, I can’t say because there was no indication as to it’s compatibility with any OS. No doubt if you are willing to spend a little more time searching you could easily turn up some very good ones. All the games below are freeware apart from the first one from Game top which is actually a commercial title that is being given away.

Imperial Sudoku (2.01Mb)

This game is quite a good alternative to today’s giveaway, with a levels editor and music to set the scene. You do get your browser opening to the Game top site when the game is closed down, otherwise there’s no restrictions. I’ve checked the download for viruses and it was clean. You can download it from:

http://www.gametop.com/download-free-games/sudoku-download/



Pure Sudoku v1.12 (8.49Mb)

Pure Sudoku received some good reviews and scored 3.5 out of 5 from 28 votes. You can place your own images into the data folder as there’s a random background shown behind the puzzle which means you can really personalize this one to your own tastes.. It works on all windows platforms from 9x to Vista:


http://www.download.com/Pure-Sudoku/3000-2111_4-10477455.html



Sudoku v1.1:

This is a very basic Sudoku game, but for the size, who cares, it does the job, though the previous two are visually more stunning. (338kb) You need Microsoft’s Net Framework v2.0 or later for this to work. 15 users voted an average of 2.5 out of 5 for this game. It works on all windows platforms from 9x to Vista.


http://www.download.com/Sudoku/3000-2111_4-10668151.html?tag=lst-1


Net Framework link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en




Ichiban Sudoku v2 (9.17Mb) - Quote “Pit your mind against the clock while you let your body rock to the oriental hip-hop soundtrack. Create, print, solve, or hint. There are four levels of infinite puzzle creation. The tutorial provides clear and concise instruction for those totally new to Sudoku, while experts should enjoy the intuitive design which allows faster marking and solving”. This was rated 4.5 out of 5 by seven users. It works on all windows platforms from 9x to Vista.

http://www.download.com/Ichiban-Sudoku/3000-2111_4-10528276.html?tag=lst-10







And here are a couple of browser freebies for those with limited hard disc space, or just don’t want to clutter their computers with more than necessary:


Monterosa Sudoku:

http://www.monterosa.co.uk/sudoku/index.shtml


Baseball Sudoku:

http://arcade.espn.go.com/baseball-sudoku.htm

And lastly, a little off the point, but an interesting article about Merscom…..Dark Horses indeed :lol:

http://www.mcvuk.com/press-releases/34713/Merscom-to-bring-Sudoku-to-Xbox-LIVE-Arcadereg



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Thx, nice game.
#1: The skins take most of the size. (74Mb of 83Mb on HDD)

Way too large file size for such a basic game...are the backgrounds video or something? How does this compare to other Sudokus? Thanks GGAOTD?