April 26^th, 2006 (4:14pm) - Mastiff announced today that it has shipped Dr.Sudoku for the Game Boy Advance to major retailers across North America. Dr. Sudoku promises to be the definitive handheld version of the puzzle phenomenon that is sweeping the nation.

In addition to the hundreds of hours of brain challenging entertainment that Dr. Sudoku offers gamers, recent studies suggest that games like Dr. Sudoku can actually increase people’s lifespan. According to a recent study conducted at the University of Edinburgh, games such as Sudoku can awaken ’survival genes’ that lay dormant in the human brain. These survival genes make the brain cells live longer and resist disease, strokes and the effects of drugs.

The Dr. Sudoku video game features 1,000 hand created puzzles, Original Mode, which lets you create you own Sudoku puzzles, a tutorial mode, help for those moments when you really are stuck, the ability to "pencil in" possible solutions, and a puzzle problem creation mode. BusinessWeek.com recently said that Dr. Sudoku "could be the next Tetris."

Sudoku looks like a math problem, but it’s not. The rules are simple: start with a grid consisting of nine three-by-three squares in which some of the numbers are already supplied. Fill in the blank squares so that each column, row, and three-by-three grid contains a number from 1 to 9 with none repeated.