Let's face facts, it would be really hard to screw up sudoku. The only thing I'd imagine you could do to accomplish this would be to have broken puzzles with multiple or no solutions. Carol Vorderman's Sudoku for the PS2 does not do this so in that aspect, it succeeds. Everything else(tutorials, graphics, music) is just gravy on the biscuits so consider anything negative I say here to be extremely nitpicky.
I haven't played that much sudoku beyond the easy level puzzles so the 30 minutes of video tutorials describing various techniques at each difficulty level were fairly insightful. Unfortunately they didn't letterbox them for a 4:3 ratio from the original PSP versions and they are vertically stretched. The controls were pretty easy to figure out but it wasn't immediately clear how to "pre-mark" the squares with the possible number combinations. The music seems to only be one track a few minutes long, but it sounds nice and unobtrusive. Strangely, the manual has not been re-done from the PC version and still lists an option to print out puzzles. The most unique parts are the career and challenge modes which has you completing increasingly difficult puzzles, achieving martial arts-style belts and dans along the way.
None of this helps me to feel any better about playing this on a Playstation 2 with its 128-bit 294 MHz Emotion Engine processor. Minus the videos, this could feasibly be recreated on any early 8-bit systems. I also really enjoyed Puzzle Challenge: Crosswords and More! but I haven't cracked it open since I first played once it after purchasing it back in May of last year. If I had a PSP both of those would be great for short bursts of gameplay(I used to play the mobile phone Gameloft version of sudoku fairly often) but when I am able to actually find an hour or two to play, I find I'd rather experience one of the hundreds of other graphically rich games that I couldn't easily recreate with a pencil and a piece of paper.
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