500 Games, Games and more Games

500 Games, Games and more Games is a shareware compilation CD. The technical specs for the compilation show WIN 95 as the minimum requirement but many of the games were developed for WIN 3.1 or earlier. The games accessed via a game browser which runs from the CD, this can run some games directly so the user can preview them but most have to be installed. They are grouped into the following 'game banks': Adventure + War Games: Thirty-eight games of which the first twenty five or so are in alphabetical order. The games here include several text games such as a 1984 version of Crowther & Woods' Adventure from Jerry D. Pohl and this 1996 version from Paul Muñoz-Colman both of which are DOS games.
Windows games include D.R.O.D., Exile II: Crystal Souls, Pelvis-n-Space and The Adventures of Captain Comic. Not all the entries here are really games, there's a Character Constructor for use with FUDGE, CORPS and Eternal Soldier game systems together with two other character editors, one for Marvel comic games and another called/for FTH (From The Hip). None of the editors seems applicable to the games in the compilation.; DMaid a playing aid for dungeon masters; Game Hack Pro* a cheat editor for Daggerfall, Fantasy General, Panzer general, Warcraft 2 and Heroes of Might & Magic.

• Arcade Games Bank 1 & Arcade Games Bank 2: A total of eighty games including Avoid The Roids, Crazy Gravity, Gravity Well, Moraff's Escapade, Ms. Chomp, Six Feet Under and Tritris. There are clones/variants of many popular games including Tetris, Joust, Missile Attack, Asteroids and so on.

• Board Games Bank 1 & Board Games Bank 2: Fifty six games including eight chess games and chess based puzzles, four checkers games, four 'Mastermind' style games and four backgammon games. The Game of the Amazons two versions of Arasan Chess one a 16-bit and a the other a 32-bit version, Cheat Mine, Game Chest and Patolli

• Card and Dice Games: Thirty-nine games including four Bridge games, three Cribbage implementations, four Yahtzee variations together with Euchre, Canasta, Pinochle. Some of the games that are on the database include Green Thumb Cards, Crib from Keith Westley, and Ancient Yacht from LatticeWork Software

• Casino Games Bank 1 & Casino Games Bank 2: There are fifty-three games in these two groups and they include seven Blackjack games, fifteen Poker / Video poker games and twelve Slot Machine games. Among these games are Noisy Video Poker and Blackjack, Slots of Trivia, and Real Video Poker

• Educational Games: There are forty games on the CD but only thirty-nine in the game browser. The games in this group are mainly for children, math tutors, spelling and counting games etc, they include Dr. Mysto The Mindreader, School-Mom - ColorBook, Dino Numbers, and Dino Spell. In among all the worthy edutainment games is Komodo Market a 'grown up' stock trading game.

• Solitaire Games Bank 1 & Solitaire Games Bank 2: Fifty-nine games in all and, while many are implementations of single games, there are a good number of collections of solitaire games, for example there are two versions of Paradise Solitaire one listed as Paradise Solitaire 3.1 and the other listed as Paradise Solitaire 95, both contain thirty games with twenty more being made available when the shareware was registered. Other games included here are Solitaire King: Beleagured Castle, Solitaire King: Busy Aces and other Solitaire Kinggames, Chinese Solitaire from Randy Rasa, Patience - Columns and Super Marble Solitaire

• Sports Simulations and Games: Just twenty-one games in this group, they include Another Pool, Bomb Golf, TZ-Minigolf, and Office Darts 301

• Strategy Games Bank 1 & Strategy Games Bank 2: A grand total of eighty games in these two groups, forty each. Many of the games could be described as logic puzzles but it's an odd mix of games as it includes variations on dominoes, a jigsaw game, a couple of concentration style games, and a tetris game. Some of the games to be found here are BattleStar from Gregory Braun, Brickbat, Button Madness, Color Linez, Kyodai and MicroBalls

• Word Games: Thirty-seven games including five Crossword games including The Gowords Assistant, seven Hangman games including Hangman 2, four Wordsearch games and variations on Boggle such as BogOut