The 'Jongg CD!

The Good
Of the twenty games supplied on this CD only a few stand out - the rest are really quite poor.

Morejongg is the principle game of the set, and is a very well put together game. Thre is a huge range (perhaps too huge) of options, including game size, style, rules, tilesets (the graphics on the actual game tiles), backgrounds, music, etc. If you enjoy Mahjongg, or any similar board/puzzle game then this is the best of the lot.

3D-Jongg is even better than MoreJongg. Rather than matching pairs of identical tiles, you have to match 3 at a time. The game is also a little faster and simpler than MoreJongg which makes it a little more playable. Great fun!

The Phrase Detective game is also pretty good, and there are a wide range of phrases to work out. It's challenging and fun to play, but I guess it could get dull after a while.

Also great fun are the Jigsaw games, especially Fancy Jiggler. With a range of piece sets and the ablity to use any available image, this game can be quite addictive.

By the way... the music and voice effects are great.

The Bad
Quite a few of the games are really quite poor. I know that these were more-or-less entirely put together by one man, which is far more than I could ever do, so I'm not sure I have the right to bitch. Suffice to say there is enough good stuff to make it so the bad stuff doesn't matter.

I have one final gripe. There is a certain lack of consistency of style between these games. For some games, you move the mouse to the top of the screen to get the menu, for others you right click on the game, and for the rest - well, I couldn't find a menu. Also some of the menus are very similar, while the rest are wildly different and looking very much like Win 3.x dialogue boxes. Please understand, this is not really a big problem, it's just a little annoying to me as a programmer.

By the way... the music and voice effects, while great, can get a little annoying after a while. But that's really a compliment, as I'm the sort of person who instantly disables the music in every game.

The Bottom Line
These are the highlights (and low-lights) of the CD. While being quite entertaining to play, many of these games tend to get a bit boring after a while. But then that's true of most games out there. If you're into this kind of gaming it's worth having, if only for the occasional game of something quick and different.

For me, it makes a wonderful break from the far more serious games I play most of the rest of the time. I have it installed on my laptop, so when I'm waiting for time to pass in a long game of Transport Tycoon or Sim City, I can just switch to it and play away while watching the world go by on my PC.