10,000 Games

The Good
Well there's 10,000 games so there must be something in here that's good and there is.

The Four Up game is simple, it didn't stay long on my pc, but I never managed to beat it. The same goes for the Gomoku and the Chess Championship games which I found to be really challenging while the tile matching King Solomon's Lost Mines also kept me entertained for about an hour.

There's a lot here I did not like but when I got bored trying out really simple games there was always a Sudoku puzzle or a Solitaire game to give me a challenge.

I reckon that the total number of 'game combinations' here is actually a lot more than the 10,000 claimed games. My estimate is well over 11,000 before I even considered the 'Best Games' compilation and that's allowing for the possibility that many Sudoku games may be duplicated.

The Bad
Oh, there's a lot to dislike about this compilation, and to be fair the same applies to many mega-compilations of this type, the question is 'Where to start?'.

Firstly I can see why, with so many games to install, the compilers found it necessary to provide nine distinct installation processes on the first menu and ten on the second. Most of the content is sold as separate products anyway and this way allows the user to save disc space by installing selectively.
What I don't like is that some games install in their own folder, some install on a folder called Selectsoft and others in a folder called Selectsoft Games. I like to keep my machine tidy and expect professionally produced products to install in a tidy manner.
Oh, and while I'm banging on about the install processes, the '2002 Games' compilation took so long to install that I was able to leave the machine, cook and eat lunch, have a cup of coffee and watch some TV before it completed.

Second, there's the content. Many of these games such as 'Alien Space Shoot', Olympiad, 'Bows & Arrows', 'Spot the Card' and others are so simple that I can't see them taxing an aged Commodore 64.
Some such as 'Guess the Colour'. where cards are dealt from a deck and the player guesses whether the next card will be red or black, and it's brethren 'Guess the Suit' and 'Higher or Lower', I leave you dear reader to work out just what gameplay there is in these titles, are so simple that I'm not even sure they class as games. They are, however, really, really boring.

Thirdly, and this is personal taste thing, is the style of the games. There are lots of games built like those in the Pop! Drop! & Forget category using some generic game-making engine, i.e. they all have the same timer bar, they all pivot and zoom in the same way, they use broadly the same colour palette and have the same look and feel. These games don't have much sparkle or appeal, they do what they're supposed to do but without without any panache or flair.
There are the 'odd' games that seem to have come from a different develop-by-numbers stable. These are games like Whack-a-duck or catch the falling baby beavers/ food parcels/ Christmas presents dropped by the stork/ helicopter/ or Santa. These have brighter colours and feel 'fresher' but they're still so simple that, ultimately, they don't have any real lasting appeal.

The Bottom Line
This stretches the definition of what a game actually is.
This compilation, and others like it, takes the definition of a game to the extreme by counting each combination of game configuration options as a separate game.
For example, applying this principle to a Breakout clone means that a hundred games can be claimed for different start configurations and combinations of power-up blocks, or to a Space Invader clone where starting with a screen of different shaped enemies counts as a new game.
The classic example in this collection is the game engine that generates and plays a game of Sudoku. I can just imagine the marketing people thinking "Newspapers claim to publish a different game each day, that means we can put lots of separate puzzles on a CD and count them as lots of different games because each one is replayable and they all have different 'content'".

The big surprise for me was the Tangram Puzzles, I've not played them on a computer before and I really enjoyed the change, of all the games here this compilation is the one I will keep the longest.