Putt-Putt's Fun Pack

The Good
This is a collection of six minigames. It was superseded not long after its release by Putt-Putt and Fatty Bear's Activity Pack, which includes all of its games alongside others. But since I plan to go through and review all of Humongous' games in release order, I thought I might as well give the original its own review.

The minigames included are Tic-Tac-Toe, a Pachinko game, Checkers, a spelling game, Concentration and a picture-matching game.

The best of the minigames is definitely Checkers. It's a game that has some level of strategic depth. And it does have a semi-competent AI when playing on the hardest difficulty level. It doesn't play flawlessly by any means, but considering this game is first and foremost aimed at kids, perhaps pitting them against a truly competent AI would have been a bit cruel.

The same goes for the AI of Tic-Tac-Toe's hardest level. Given that it would be impossible to win against a perfect AI, it makes sense that it still makes some infrequent mistakes.

The Bad
Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. As you can probably guess from my list of the minigames alone, this is hardly the world's most unique collection of games. Two of them are just cosmetically altered versions of games from Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, while the other four are so generic that I probably don't even need to describe them for you to know exactly what you're in for.

Perhaps the lack of creativity in the gameplay department would be forgivable with a decent presentation, but the graphics are no better than in the rest of Humongous' pre-Freddi Fish games. And the music consists only of some mediocre tracks from Putt-Putt Joins the Parade.

There isn't any sort of tutorial either. Granted, most of the minigames are so primitive that they don't really need one, but at least Checkers could have used one.

The Bottom Line
Perhaps back in 1993, there was some value in this small collection of simple games, but there's no real point in playing it now that a superior version exists that's far more readily available. But even if it wasn't for that, I still wouldn't recommend it. You can find tons of better versions of its games elsewhere.