300 Favourite Games

300 Favourite Games is a compilation of allegedly 'hand picked' shareware and demonstration games. Though the CD inlay says that these games run in either/both WIN 3.1 and WIN 95 many in fact are DOS games.

The observant will note that the total of the games in all categories comes to three hundred and thirty seven which is more than advertised. Some of these games date back as far as 1983 while the majority date to the early 1990's. The game browser can run some programs direct from the CD, it can copy DOS games to the player's machine while for Windows games it will run an installation program, where there is a manual it will attempt to open it with either MS Word or Notepad.

A few of the games tested would only run in a WIN 3.1 environment while others would not run at all because the reckoned that the thirty day trial period had expired.

The install process puts two shortcuts onto the users machine, one links to a product catalogue while the other links to the game browser/installer both of which are on the CD. The games are grouped into the following categories where the numbers in brackets;* Adventure Games (27)

These are nearly all DOS games, they start with a DOS versions of 3D Tunnel, Adventure a Colossal Caves clone and Abmis the Lion, the first three games in the Hugo's House of Horrors series are present and the group ends with Walls of Bralock, Wa-tor for Windows and Weird Island.

• Arcade Games (116)

A mixture of games in the biggest game group of this compilation. It starts with 3D Demon, Advanced T-Robots, Aldo's Assault and the platform game Aldo's Adventure. There are pinball games, space shooters, Missile Attack clones, Shooters such as Earth Invasion and Alien Worlds, Puzzlers like Jetpack, Action games such as FBI Fred, and oddly The Oakflat Nuclear Power Plant Simulator is also in this group.

• Board Games (21)
  Often in such compilations there are multiple versions of chess and mahjongg in board game groups but here there is hardly any duplication. All the old favourites Go, Yahtzee, Mahjongg, Battleships, Backgammon etc are here together with a few oddities such as Bingo, Crosswords, a jigsaw game, and Ungaria which is a grid based puzzler

• Card Games (40)

A decent collection of card games with just the odd duplicate, for example there are two versions of cribbage, pinochle and euchre.

• Casino Games (1)

Given there are so many casino games around it's odd that Poker and Blackjack games were included as Card Game group leaving Baccarat by Raymond Buti as the only casino game on offer.

• Kids Games (25)

This is a selection of educational titles ranging from Animated Multiplication and Division to Zurk's Learning Safari, other titles in both series' are also available.

• Mind Games (67)

What exactly is a 'Mind Game'? Well here it includes board games such as Cutlass Software's Aggravation, hangman games, another cribbage game, Moraff's Spherejongg and Moraff's Ringjongg, Taking Care of Business and of course there's a Tetris clone, crossword puzzler and Wordsearch game in here too

• Simulation Games (1) - Just the one game here, Strategic Bomber from Paul Van Zyl, and it's a strategy game and not a simulation

• Sports Games(9)

Three golf games including AM's Mini Golf 3D, two fishing games Bass Tour v4.3 and Fisherman's Delight, 1994Pool, Darts by Scott Semon, Digital Downs a horse racing game and Matchup Basketball

• Strategy Games (29)

Apples & Oranges heads this group, other games include The Jelly Bean Factory, Ports of Call, and Mice Men. Also present are version of WinRisk, WinTrek, a Pipe Mania variant together with CBT - a trio of games Color Cross / Battle Charge / Tunnel War, the oddly named Grot 31 and others.