I’m not really a logic puzzle sort of person, so it’s strange to me that I enjoy Sudoku at all, but I do. Playing feels like trying to untangle a big pile of cables. At first, none of it makes any sense at all, but eventually a free end can be teased out and there’s nothing but the problem at hand. After a while, a certain Sudoku-adapted pattern of thought asserts itself and even though I can’t stop and explain why some of the solutions are obvious, they just are.

I discovered Sudoku in December, 2005 and after a brief stalk got in the habit of starting my day with a quick puzzle or two. I got out of the habit when I got a Nintendo DS and developed a paranoid and absorbing relationship with online Mario Kart players. A few years back I picked up a few Sudoku games for the iPhone, but the habit never really reasserted itself. None of the games I found were quite right. The interfaces felt clunky.

Last week, though, I noticed Sudoku HD for the iPad, and it cost $1.99, which seemed to be well in the territory of something to try. The developer didn’t overthink the notation system (you just pick a square and pick a number. If you pick more than one number for a given square, all the numbers for it become notations until you clear the square).

There are four difficulty levels. For purposes of helping me feel like my brain has warmed up in the morning, or for something to do when I’m finished with one task and want a quick diversion before starting another, I’m happy to work on the “normal” level of its four levels of difficulty. “Normal” seems to involve being handed one row or square, which is enough to get things moving. “Easy” is a bit too easy: You can knock out a couple of rows and a couple of squares in very few moves. I’ve tried one “hard” puzzle but no “insane” puzzles. The hard puzzle required a few three-way comparisons, which you don’t come across so much in the “normal” or “easy” levels. I don’t know what “insane” might involve. More time, I guess. All Sudoku seem to be a matter of time.

The game just looks nice, too. It really works on the iPad’s larger display.

There’s not a lot in the way of special features: It has an autofill button you can press up to four times to get help with a square you’re stuck on. After the fourth time, your finishing time won’t count and won’t be recorded. There’s also a way to enter your own puzzle, and the program checks to see if there’s more than one solution before allowing you to play (though you can tell it to let you play anyhow after being warned). There are also a few features that help you keep from making simple mistakes, though these can be turned on and off. I prefer to keep them on, and to make up for my lack of purity in that area I’ll refrain from tweeting my record-breaking times. Only fair.

Unblock Me is something I used to have on my Handspring Visor under the name “Traffic.” I’m not some sort of master game logician, so this may be one of those games more analytical types will tear through like the Hulk in a piñata factory, but it’s diverting.

One difference from “Traffic”: It doesn’t seem to keep track of the number of moves required to win, at least in easy mode.

Oh … Winning: you have to slide the blocks around such that the red block can go out the door to the right.

I’ve been trying to like games on the iPhone since, well … I guess since before I had one, when I had an iPod touch. With a few exceptions, I haven’t liked most of the ones I’ve played: they take forever to load, if the phone isn’t in a freshly rebooted state they flake out, and there are weird little hiccups and stutters now and then. Where mobile games are concerned, I’m after something I can turn on and play to kill a few minutes. I don’t want to think about rebooting my phone to get the best performance out of one.

This weekend I got a hankering for a good racing game in the mode of Wipeout and downloaded a few likely candidates from the app store. Bleh. One wouldn’t load more than once out of three attempts after a restart, one had problems keeping up the frame rate (even after a restart), and both had solid four-star average reviews.

I decided to dust off my Nintendo DS and Mario Kart DS. Here’s me on Mario Kart DS almost four years ago:

I’ve played kart games on Playstation, but they’ve never been quite right. The developers (in the games I’ve seen) seem to have decided that since the kart genre is supposed to be forgiving and more “fun” than “intense,” it’s o.k. to just slow everything down instead of working out better physics. It’s a cognitive block they’re dealing with … like they’ve forgotten they’re in control of the game world, so they can mess with the models. The resulting mess has always seemed like “Wipeout or Need for Speed, only using non-hovering cars with throttle governors.” That sucks.

Mario Kart seems to get the notion that the inherent unreality of, you know, heat-seeking turtle shell missiles and the ability to transmogrify into a gigantic flying bullet that travels at high speeds and knocks over everything in its path pretty much shatters the need to bother with realistic crash and bump models. And it understands that to most of us, traveling in an open cab about six inches off the ground seems really, really fast. So Mario Kart feels fast, and sort of intense, but also fun and forgiving.

So Mario Kart, especially from my aging perspective, seems like just about the right thing to scratch the Wipeout itch: feels fast; has crazy, bendy tracks; has competitors who can lob projectiles. Missing: cool techno soundtrack.

To bring things back to the iPhone, Mario Kart has one other thing: When played on a Nintendo DS, it loads up in little time, and it doesn’t exceed the resources of the machine it’s running on (because its programmers knew how much of any given thing (available cycles, memory) the game can count on).

Not to totally slag the iPhone as a game platform. I enjoy simple puzzle games like Wurdle. And I found another pretty nice quick pickup sort of game:

Moon Drop by Nimblebit is a variation on the classic lunar lander genre. It’s simple, it loads quickly, it’s fun, and it has a Twitter-driven leaderboard that’s pretty cool for being such a simple, cheap ($0.99) app. Most importantly, it doesn’t push the iPhone at all. It just works.

From the Star Trek Online FAQ:

Q: Will there be an economy?

A: Many of the details are still in the works, but yes, there will be an economy that makes sense in the Star Trek universe. Since the Federation has explicitly done away with money, expect bartering and trading of goods to be an important part of the economy. Less tangible forms of economics such as Reputation are also not out of the question.

I always thought Picard’s TNG season 1 soliloquy about the Federation being wrapped up in something other than the pursuit of profit was less about people being completely over currency and more about people being completely over property-based measures of value.

How many units of rigellian slugbat vomit is a kilo of Vulcan black market tribble gizzards worth in an economy with replicators? And why would an economy that presumably still needed to parcel out its energy expenditures in order to make the replicators produce equitably distributed goods and materials do away with some abstract, portable measure of individual resource allocation, like dollars or credits or steganographically etched Ceti Eel shells?

Maybe the barter and trade will be centered around non-replicatable goods (like dilithium?) and fascinating works of art produced by people who use their replicator allotments to produce towering sculptures, like Anzaz of Silonius IV and his epic “Quivering Ecstasy of the Cat-buzzards.”

Don’t know why I care. Probably won’t even be a Mac client.

Quick Chess is a specially adapted teaching version of chess. We’re digging it around here.

I started playing checkers with Ben a few months ago after he saw me playing Big Bang Checkers on the iPhone. He likes playing against the computer, but it differs from me in that it is merciless and unforgiving, whereas I frequently forget myself and blunder into triple jumps.

It’s been pretty interesting watching Ben learn how to play. He got the mechanics quickly enough, especially kinging, which he loves to do above all else.

Initially he was very conservative with kings because he didn’t want to risk them. They’re special, right? So why push them out of the safety of the back row? I eventually convinced him that kings could be whirling juggernauts of destruction and he became more liberal with them.

I took advantage of his imitative urge by making it a point to think through each of my possible moves out loud. He picked up the habit, too, and he’s learned to play pretty decent defense, both anticipating the trouble a move could cause him from a move out and moving a piece behind an endangered piece to block a jump. Sometimes he gets stuck wanting to move a piece that would cause him a lot of trouble and has to be unstuck, and he doesn’t like to lose a piece so I haven’t had much luck teaching him about sacrificing to set up better moves, but it’s gratifying to watch him reason things out a move ahead.

I saw Quick Chess at a local Learning Palace, which we had gone to for a crystal-growing kit and picked it up as an impulse buy. For his age, checkers really is fine but I figured it couldn’t hurt to see how he’d do with chess, especially a version made for younger children.

The Quick Chess board is two-sided. The side for beginners eliminates the second rook, knight and bishop positions to make it 5×5 instead of the traditional 8×8. The other side is an 8×8 board.

The 5×5 board is half the innovation. The other half is the rule set, which introduces chess as a series of mini-games. The first variation uses only pawns, with the players trying to advance their pieces across the board. Kings, rooks, knights, bishops and queens come into play in later variations, one piece at a time.

The first few runs through the pawns game, it took Ben some adjustment to get over habits learned from checkers: Captures instead of jumps, captures aren’t mandatory, pawns capture differently from how they move, etc. He does need help remembering the differences between pieces, but it’s clear that it’s all sinking in. Each time we finish a variation, I show him the next piece he’s going to learn, demonstrating how it moves. The limited games introduce the pieces in ascending order of potency, so Ben gets pretty excited learning about the “powers” of the next piece down the line, and it helps reinforce the differences.

We’ll see how well it holds his attention long term, but in the week we’ve had the game he’s asked to play it more than he’s asked to play any other. I welcome it as an improvement over “Candyland.”

“Something’s gumming up the plumbing

Poor Luigi’s in a bind

Giant turtles out to get him

Creepy crabs are right behind

Fighter Flies! Jeeper Jipes!

They’re all coming out the pipes!

MARIO, WHERE ARE YOU?!”

I think I remember one thing about Nintendo from high school: It wasn’t Atari, so it sucked. Nintendo from college and post-college sucked, too, for reasons I think had something to do with the lack of blood codes for Mortal Kombat and a lot of “Nintendo’s an eeeeevil game monopoly!” hand-waving.

The lack of blood codes … that was the big one. I was an adult, and I didn’t want some nanny game in my living room, protecting me from ADULT CONTENT I WAS ENTITLED TO! If I’m old enough to die for my country, then damnit I’m old enough to see a fountain of blood when Kano knocks Scorpion’s block off.

Over a decade of living in the largely “adult” wilderness that is Sony Playstation and PS2 gaming, though, has left me feeling less than satisfied. When I had a lot of time to hammer out the intricacies of Wipeout, the fussy and “realism”-oriented “seriousness” of adult games was fine. Now, I’ve got less time and usually don’t play for more than five or ten minutes at a time (unless it’s a puzzler and I’ve got something on my mind) and my Nintendo DS is a much nicer companion. Now that Mario Kart DS has arrived at the house, I think I might soon become a Nintendo bigot.

It has very bright colors. The characters are all hunkered over on little karts, and they’re the same people I’ve been dealing with at the arcade since I had a paper route, plus a few I don’t recognize because I deprived myself of any Mario stuff between high school and, well, two months ago. So there’s a skeletal turtle and Donkey Kong is a good guy now and there are a few more characters I’m going to assume are beloved of Nintendo people.

The physics of the game are forgiving and broad … Bumping into someone doesn’t result in a stall or explosion, sliding around the corners is easy, little accleration pads are plentiful. It’s possible to win the first circuit without picking up the manual, even after accidentally starting the race in reverse because the home button on a Nintendo game seems to usually be the middle right instead of bottom (as on a Playstation).

I’ve played kart games on Playstation, but they’ve never been quite right. The developers (in the games I’ve seen) seem to have decided that since the kart genre is supposed to be forgiving and more “fun” than “intense,” it’s o.k. to just slow everything down instead of working out better physics. It’s a cognitive block they’re dealing with … like they’ve forgotten they’re in control of the game world, so they can mess with the models. The resulting mess has always seemed like “Wipeout or Need for Speed, only using non-hovering cars with throttle governors.” That sucks.

Mario Kart seems to get the notion that the inherent unreality of, you know, heat-seeking turtle shell missiles and the ability to transmogrify into a gigantic flying bullet that travels at high speeds and knocks over everything in its path pretty much shatters the need to bother with realistic crash and bump models. And it understands that to most of us, travelling in an open cab about six inches off the ground seems really, really fast. So Mario Kart feels fast, and sort of intense, but also fun and forgiving.

And I guess I prefer the mascots. Where Sega ushered in the era of edgy, adultish mascots with Sonic, Nintendo held what it had. Mario is still this little dude who has adventures, but retains his fundamentally positive world view. There’s no self-mutilating self-loathing to be found in him. I guess Wario is “evil,” but it’s the sort of “evil” that seems to involve wanting to win a lot, and laughing at you when he does.

I don’t want to wander too far into that territory, so I’ll leave it at this: Mario feels like an organic extension of Nintendo’s overall world view. He rose to his position in the Nintendo stable of characters over 20 years … not as an exercise in board-room mascot generation like Sonic or Crash Bandicoot. You know … “People can get a cheeseburger anywhere, ok? They come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere and the attitude. That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.” And that’s what Sonic’s about.

Anyhow … far afield.

Mario Kart is a blast. It’s the first game on the DS that’s made me wish I was wealthy enough to go out and buy a DS and a copy of one game for everyone I know, which brings us to the extra layer of cool on top of an already fun games: Nintendo’s wireless game service.

The DS comes with built-in WiFi. For the games on the market up until a few days ago, that meant that a group of DS’s could peer up for multi-player action similar to how Apple’s Rendezvous works with iChat … a zero-configuration, “just works” network. Nintendo’s done some cool things with that already. If not everyone owns a game, some of the games can be cloned from DS to DS wirelessly, allowing people to play a multi-player version easily. That’s very cool, and very different from the sort of mentality that has Sony sticking rootkits on everyone’s PC.

Mario Kart takes advantage of something a little better than that: If you’re near a wireless access point that’s either open or you know the WEP key for, the DS can peer up with Nintendo’s Internet match service and you can play other Mario Kart racers in your region or around the world.

Setting that up on my own wireless network was a snap. It took less than two minutes, with the only hangup being that the DS has a hard time with WAPs that have SSID beaconing turned off. If I’d felt like being a moderate jerk, I probably could have peered up through my neighbor’s completely open WAP, but I wanted the best signal available.

Anyhow … within five minutes I had a match with three other racers. The worst part of the overall experience is to be found here. It takes a while to find other people looking for a race (maybe two to three minutes), and it’s entirely random unless you know someone else’s friend code. You also can’t interact with the other racers. I didn’t know anything about the batch I ended up with besides their handles and their logos (mine’s a three-eyed smiley, and I’ve chosen the nom de course “MutantMike”). Courses are picked based on a group vote. The majority pick wins, and if there is no majority the game server picks one at random from the player’s choices.

The online racing experience is perfect. Very smooth, no sense of lag or latency. Sometimes people suddenly drop out with no comment on the game’s part. Others report that a high proportion of the dropouts seem to be losing badly when they disappear, so I’d be inclined to chalk that up to bugs in human firmware vs. the wireless software.

I’ve gotten my ass kicked repeatedly from my office, the futon downstairs, and my bed, but it’s a ton of fun. The powerups scattered throughout the game offer decent equalizers, so if you’re having a bad race it’s possible to get a good powerup, focus a little more, and pull out a win at the last minute. And as surely as someone online is always way better than you, there’s usually someone lurking around who’s way more lame … or at least drunk and off his game.

“So you’re saying it’s fun?”

Yes. It’s fun. Really, really fun.