Have you picked up your PSP Gos yet? Been checking out the PSP Minis game selections? If yes, then you probably have noticed that the game prices are double that of their iPhone App Store counterparts.

Amidst the usual barrage of less-than-note-worthy DS titles, this week's big release is the sequel to the 2001 FPS Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Hitler's got the usual evil army, and it's gonna be up to you to infiltrate and beat them from the inside. There's a few more you might want to check out, so read on for this edition of On Shelves This Week.

Homebrew developer Gefa has dropped by our forums to release ndSudoku, a simple sudoku homebrew game for PSP written in Python using the Nanodesktop library.


Download: ndSudoku v1.0.0
Visit: QJ.NET PSP Development Forum

Who could have known math games could be so much fun? We've seen it with the success of Sudoku, and it seems like there's no stopping the spread of this newfound fun way of conquering fear of numbers. Based on Sudoku's younger brother, Kakro of Japan, comes Kakuro Nichiyou PSP 1.2 from homebrew game dev MK2k. To see how challenging this game is, check out the details at the full article.

Download: Kakuro Nichiyou PSP 1.2
Discuss: QJ.NET's PSP Development Forums

Developer EvilDooinz has announced the release of SudokuZen R2. New to this sort of puzzle game? You can catch up on a more detailed explanation of the homebrew's mechanics over in the full article.


Download: SudokuZen release 2 (firmware 1.xx)
Download: SudokuZen release 2 (firmware 3.xx)

With another Thursday ready to greet PlayStation Store shoppers in Europe, gamers have something to celebrate about as they got the jump ahead of their other regional counterparts when the PlayStation 3 Store featured the Army of Two Veteran pack, as well as several other notable titles, as its premiere downloads. You can check out the entire list of downloadable goodies for this week in our full article.

Playing commercial puzzle games is a good idea, but sometimes you just get that urge to play something a little closer to home - homebrew that is. Speaking of which, French developer bobthetouriste has designed a puzzle game by the name of 1..100. Find out more about it in the full article after the jump.


Download: 1...100

Up for a bit of mind-bending homebrew puzzle games? PlayStation Portable developer EvilDooinz has released a new homebrew game called SudokuZen. As the name suggests, it's based on numbers logic game that at one point or another, turned our brains to mush.

Check out the full article for more info about this release.




Download: SudokuZen v1.0 (FW 1.50)
Download: SudokuZen v1.0 (CFW 3.xx)

Where else can you play Sudoku with a martial arts twist? The best part is, it's going to the handhelds - PSP and DS. Zendoku promises some pretty interesting (albeit mind bending) gameplay.

Zendoku from Zoonami and Eidos looks fun and will definitely give players' gray matters working overtime. The minigames and the puzzles themselves look challenging. The characters are varied from the samurai Musashi, the Kendo master Sakura, the sumo wrestler Yatta, fencer Lorraine, the ninja Kingkage and the others. The trailers also show the training mode with the master. The classic Sudoku game is also in attendance, along with the game's grid game of symbols instead.

There hasn't been any official announcements as to Zendoku's release, but it was said to expect it this year. Might as well check out the screens and trailers while you're waiting. Enjoy!

Some more videos and a whole lot of screens at Full Article!

Zendoku for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) and Nintendo DS (DS), simply put, is a logic-based puzzle game Sudoku with a karate twist. It's not hard at all to understand but what's curious is the idea behind this game. Gaming site Pocket Gamer recently sat down with game developer Martin Hollis to find out once and for all.

Hollis, at the beginning of the interview, jokingly mentioned that Sudoku needs ninjas and that's all the explanation the fans will ever need. And then he commented that it is Zoonami Ltd.'s priority to come up with good and unique video games. He admitted that there were a lot of bumps along the way and the title wasn't really intended for the handhelds. Hollis remarked,

We've made a large number of game prototypes on a variety of platforms and learned a lot along the way, but unfortunately struggled to find development deals that were right for us. With Zendoku, we didn't decide specifically to make a DS or a PSP game. The important thing for us is to make a good game and choose the right platform for it.

And we believe that it has all the potential to become a great game. Instead of numbers, players will be matching up colorful symbols in Zendoku. Aside from the puzzle game, there are various characters available with his own unique graphics, themes and storylines.

"Every time you complete a row, column, or 3x3 box on the sudoku grid, you launch an attack on your opponent. You also launch an attack when you fill in all nine of one symbol," Martin Hollis explains. Speaking of attacks, take note that these can be blocked provided that your character's lucky symbol is quickly placed on the grid.

Aside from the head-to-head combat, there is also a single player mode where everything is the same except the your opponent now is time. Accordingly, placing the lucky symbols on the grid will stop the clock momentarily. Even though Zendoku wasn't originally planned for the handhelds, Martin Hollis believes that it is a match made in heaven,

Zendoku is perfect for DS because it's a vibrant, colourful, fun Nintendo-style game. The sudoku gameplay is perfect for the stylus and the attacks are more fun on the DS with a stylus than without. Equally, we feel PSP definitely needs more fun, casual games that are pick-up-and-play, so we've developed another version of Zendoku especially for it.