Nintendo's managed to release quite a few games under its Touch Generations label, the latest being Hudson Soft's Sudoku Gridmaster, a puzzle game the provides over 400 brain teasers. It's great if you're into Sudoku, but the dry presentation as well as some touch screen shenanigans has made it the black sheep in what's already become a stellar product line.

Gridmaster does a fine job of serving up lots of Sudoku and that's about it. There's no fabulous Nintendo presentation, no franchise characters or themed game boards, and the music is just standard and boring, the type of tunes that you'd hear in an elevator or before you go to sleep. In fact, the developers should've just added sounds of the rain forest or waves crashing onto the beach, as it would have yielded a much better effect. But the real kicker is you can't turn off the music unless you kill the volume entirely.

The games puzzles are nothing more than traditional Sudoku. The game board is a grid full of tiny squares, some of which already contains numbers one through nine. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to insert missing numbers without duplicating these numbers where the row and column intersect. And to spice things up just a bit more, there are these smaller highlighted grids that'll sometimes intersect with a row or a column, a box made up of nine squares, and you have to make sure that you don't repeat the numbers in it. So if, by design, the number two is missing from a row, a column, and the box, then you're going to want to stick somewhere. Of course, where it needs to go is the real kicker, because you need to factor in the other empty boxes. Confused? Don't be. The directions are on page 16 of the game booklet.

The best thing about this game is the fact that it's been jam packed with puzzles and that the options can be changed on the fly while you're solving a puzzle. Plus, the developers allow you to enter numbers one of two ways, either by selecting them (using the stylus) from a keypad, or just writing them in a box. However, it's here where my love for this game begins to turn sour. Unlike in Brain Age, which features superb touch screen recognition, Gridmaster's blows so terribly that I often turn the game off in frustration. For whatever reason, Hudson was unable to emulate Brain Age and the result is a seriously flawed system that is unable to recognize certain numbers no matter how neatly they're drawn, the number five being the worst. At first I was just being sloppy, but writing the number five in all of its forms yielded three, two, and eight. In fact, not once was I able to successfully get the game to acknowledge the number five. This often led me to quit or just go back to poking the keypad, which, quite frankly, sucks the big one, especially since the Sudoku in Brain Age is actually enjoyable. Not only is it capable of picking up the numbers, but you can actually zoom into the grid and jot down the numbers into the boxes, and all of this was really an afterthought. Nintendo just tossed Sudoku into Brain Age for the hell of it and it provides a much better experience than Sudoku Gridmaster.

Even though I'm pissed with the way Hudson's handled the touch screen play, I'm still giving this game a three out five simply because it's a solid pick up for Sudoku fans, and the keypad saves it from being a total disaster. But don't go into this thinking that you're going to get a Nintendo-themed Sudoku game. It just lacks pizzazz. However, its $19.99 MSRP makes it semi attractive.