Big Bad Sudoku iPad Game Review

Dedicated fans of Sudoku do not need me to explain the intricacies of the game or elaborate how addictive Sudoku can be. If you have found your way to this article and play Sudoku, purchasing Big Bad Sudoku needs to be on the top of your list of iPad Apps. Easily one of the best iPad games available, Big Bad Sudoku will provide you with as many Sudoku games as you have time for.

Big Bad Sudoku allows you to choose how the new Sudoku puzzles are created. Either from a pattern generator, or simply randomly generated, all the puzzles created are guaranteed to be solvable. This iPad game has 5 different levels of difficulty ranging from easy, medium, hard, expert, or insane. Games can also be timed for an added level of difficulty.

One feature of Sudoku that adds to the fun is the Puzzle scoring. With puzzle scoring you are graded on how you solve the puzzle as well as the higher score. This provides a way to measure yourself for extra challenges and adds a competitive feel to Sudoku.

Big Bad Sudoku adds more challenges for user by allowing you to play pre-set campaigns. In addition to the difficulty of solving a Sudoku puzzle, the "New Campaign Mode" gives you the challenge of solving a series of Sudoku puzzles. The New Campaign Mode has 50 pre-determined puzzles ranging from Easy to Insane. You advance to the next puzzle by solving the first one and are awarded a cumulative score by finishing all 50 puzzles.

Multitasking & Audio

The game supports iOS4.2 multitasking on the iPad which means you can have it on in the background if you need to do other things. What's really nice about Big Bag Sudoku is the iPad game supports background audio. Users can listen to internet radio through a standalone app or Safari in addition to the iPod features built into the iPad operating system.

Social Gaming

The newest version of Big Bad Sudoku supports social gaming. You can share puzzles you are working on via email, Facebook, and even text messages. Friendly competitions can be set up with your friends. The iPad game will let you know of any games your friends have shared, allowing you to play the same games they have. If you successfully beat their score, you can let all your friends know through Facebook!

Multi-Platform Support

Big Bad Sudoku can be run on any of your iOS devices: iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. You also only to have to buy it once and are allowed to have it run on all the Apple devices registered to your iTunes account.

John Noel has been a Apple user and technology expert for over a decade. Come visit his website at http://www.myappworld.com/ which helps people find the best iPad apps such as Soudoku for iPad as well as the latest Apple products and the best iPad accessories.

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21 Nova Casino Review

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Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D review: Slow and unsteady

by Griffin McElroy on Jun 28th 2011 6:30PM

Capcom managed quite the paradoxical feat when designing the past two main entries in the Resident Evil franchise: It built the games' combat on fundamentally flawed ideas without making them fundamentally flawed. While other third-person shooters prioritized smooth, streamlined action, Resident Evil 4 and 5 deliberately hobbled the player's adroitness, and made holding off the oncoming zombie (or Ganados, or Majini) hordes a cumbersome chore. And it worked.

By severely limiting the player's locomotion, those core Resident Evil titles maintained the delicate balance between power and vulnerability -- a necessity for a great horror title. There was method in your sluggishness, as the player was forced to consider both short-term and long-term survival with every enemy encounter. Each indolent battle had context in a much, much larger campaign, and for that very reason, Capcom made a bad thing good.

Unfortunately, every last shred of that context has been stripped away from Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D.

As the title suggests, the franchise's first outing on the 3DS offers a more fully developed version of the Mercenaries mode included in Resident Evil 4 and 5. There's no cohesive campaign to be found, here -- players simply shoot their way through 29 missions spread across six tiers which steadily ramp up in difficulty.

Save for a few early training missions, each level tasks you with killing as many enemies as you can -- preferably in large sums quickly to maintain a combo multiplier -- in the time allotted. There are time extensions sprinkled across each map, but as the clock runs up, the number and strength of the enemies which spawn dramatically increases. It's a treacherous balancing act; if you die, you don't get any points at all.

Completing a level earns you a letter grade rank, as well as the potential to unlock new characters, costumes, ability-boosting perks and Medals, which show off your greatest achievements. Each character has a specific two or three-weapon set, composed of armaments like handguns, revolvers, grenade launchers, machine guns, sniper rifles and hunting bows. These sets cannot be customized, but can be unlocked for use by other characters once their owner completes every mission with the highest possible rank. (They can also be unlocked by spending 10 Play Coins, which is likely to be a much, much easier option.)

This system of progression is somewhat compelling, though Capcom's inscrutable decision to prevent the player from ever starting a new game ensures that it will be compelling exactly once. Unfortunately, that's all a fairly moot complaint to leverage against the game; regardless of how intricately you can customize your unlockable Mercenaries, the missions they'll engage in simply aren't very enjoyable.

It's not just that the formula of high score-chasing and surviving get awfully repetitive in the final few tiers. The real problem is that the series' slow, methodical combat isn't cut out to serve as the backbone for a full arcade-style shooter. When the player filled the role of the practical survivor in the core series, their character's slowness helped build tension; now that they're playing the role of the aggressive hunter, it only serves to build frustration.

A perfect example of this unfortunate exchange is Mercenaries 3D's miniboss enemies, such as the brutal chainsaw-swinging Ganados from Resident Evil 4. These damage-sponging, one-hit-killing bastards acted as terrifying roadblocks in the core series. In Mercenaries, they represent an almost certain interruption of your combo multiplier, or a calculated drain on your precious time and ammunition. That's not terror -- that's accounting.

Fortunately, that tediousness is alleviated somewhat by the presence of a Player Two -- and, even more fortunately, Mercenaries 3D's local and online co-op features work swimmingly. Getting a friend or online stranger into your mission is a quick and painless process, though the lack of a persistent lobby means you have to reform your unit between each mission. It's worth it, though -- with two skilled players working in tandem to maintain a combo while watching each others' backs, the punitive math of each enemy encounter becomes far less severe.

Teamwork doesn't solve all of the game's problems, though. Some of the design choices in Mercenaries 3D are just inexplicable: For instance, to perform a knife attack on an enemy, you have to first equip the knife using the bottom touchscreen. However, some characters don't have knives, meaning if they run out of ammo, they can only stare longingly at the breakable, ammo-filled crates scattered throughout each level. Also, though enemies look tremendous close-up, their animation falls to a handful of frames per second once they reach the outskirts of your draw distance.

Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D contains a (very brief) demo for the franchise's next full-length entry, Resident Evil: Revelations. Ultimately, though, that's an unnecessary addendum: The game itself is a demonstration. It could have been an addictive mission-based multiplayer title perfect for a portable platform, but with its limited content and quickly tiresome combat, Mercenaries 3D is little more than a fully-priced proof of concept.

This review is based on a retail copy of Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D for Nintendo 3DS provided by Capcom.

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Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax review: Impressed for time

by JC Fletcher on Jun 28th 2011 2:00PM

Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax takes the gameplay of a traditional JRPG, and squeezes it all into 30-second chunks. Inspired by this feat of game design magic, I decided to see if I could fit my whole review into 30 seconds as well. Nope! I totally couldn't.

However, even after failing to encapsulate the review into 30 seconds, I'm able to take inspiration from the game. Half-Minute Hero allows you to pray to a Time Goddess in villages to reset the 30-second countdown clock, for a fee. So if you can get to a village, and if you can afford the ever-increasing cost, you can actually extend your game time indefinitely. Instead of gold, I'm sacrificing the purity of my review gimmick in order to give myself time to talk about this great game.

Super Mega Neo Climax is an XBLA version of the PSP game Half-Minute Hero, which maintains most of the content, and all of the concept, of that original: it speeds a traditional RPG way the hell up to make it feel almost arcade-like. You fight (automatic) battles, level up, buy equipment, heal, meet NPCs, recruit party members, and then defeat the Evil Lord in his fortress -- all in less time than it takes to make a cup of ramen noodles. And then, at the completion of every quest, the game's credits roll ... and I laugh, every time.

There's really nothing missing from the RPG formula -- it's just all been simplified to an extreme. You level up in a few seconds of battling, not dozens of hours. There will be 3-4 item upgrades to buy in a quest, instead of hundreds, and you always find them in villages instead of random drops. Sidequests have you make one extra stop on your abbreviated journey, to rescue an NPC or claim a treasure.

Your choice of whether to undertake one of those sidequests, or some other variable, will open up branching paths. You're always free to return to any quest and unlock the other path -- the menu even clearly marks which missions open up new paths! You can also replay missions to get all the equipment, recruit all the available party members, or earn one of two unique "titles" for each mission. It's all summarized on the map screen, making it a breeze to find things you've missed. Because of this, I felt invited to replay the main game and find hidden stuff after completing the story, which stands in stark contrast to any other RPG, in which I'd struggle to even think back on where I'd been, much less what I could have missed.

Completing the main "Hero 30" mode unlocks a succession of extra modes starring different characters. In the PSP game, these "Evil Lord 30," "Princess 30," and "Knight 30" modes were vastly different styles of gameplay like RTS games and shooters, but here they're single missions in the style of the main game with some new rules -- a sacrifice of variety for more of the "real" experience. Those are followed by a "Hero 300" quest that brings everyone together for one final attempt to save the world; after a series of tiny RPGs, this quest, at five full minutes (with no time resets) feels genuinely epic. And that's followed by a "Hero 3" mode that gives you just three seconds between required time resets.

If you're not done shotgunning RPGs like frat party beers, there's also a ridiculous multiplayer mode that puts everyone on the same map at the same time, trying to complete the same quest. It's set up to be competitive, but the difficulty is cranked up so high that you end up having to cooperate to keep the (shared) countdown clock reset and acquire the necessary weapons. It's only at the end, after you've banded together to defeat the Evil Lord, that the game awards one of you the "True Hero" and you remember that you were supposed to be trying to outrace the other players.

I think I've broken the 30-second rule I set for myself pretty flagrantly at this point, so allow me to wrap up by saying I fell in love with this game, immediately. It's got a funny script, it's easy to learn, and I can complete a whole quest while I wait for my tea to steep. The requirements for each quest gradually build from "teensy" to "small." That difficulty curve did little to prepare me for quick, frequent death in multiplayer, though. Also, the relative lack of extra content versus the PSP version (those single spinoff missions in the place of series of RTS/shmup/action missions) is lamentable. Regardless, if you take anything away from this review -- if, in the spirit of the game, you just skimmed it in a rush -- it's that the main game is something that everyone should try, even briefly ... not that you'd have the choice to play it any way but briefly.

This review is based on the Xbox Live Arcade version of Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax, provided by Marvelous. It will be released June 29 for 800 Microsoft Points ($10).

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