40 Best Windows 95 Games (Jewel Case)

With 40 games in one CD, you'd think you might have struck a gold mine. However, this compilation just simply proves to end up being on par with an Action 52 cartridge instead, providing a large selection of games that seem to be as if they were amateur projects made with early game making programs. The only way to this review justice, however, is if I go through each individual game included.3DMaze wouldn't work on the computer for some reason.5-Card Poker is decent enough. It contains three poker modes, and wouldn't be out of place from the group of card games featured in every Windows computer.A Day at the Races is garbage. The graphics are stock, with colored horse images and a blank background. All you do is bet on a horse to see if that horse will win. BORING.Animate is actually Animated Slots, and it is...well...Slots. The name comes from the animated clipart it uses as panels, but it also does provide a couple of additional minigames for bonuses such as Blackjack and Pick the Right Icon. Decent enough for an amateur game, I suppose.Board Games for 2 is a pathetic board game compilation with no AI, stressing that you play with somebody and supposedly follow the traditional rules of these games, despite that you're able to freely break those rules. The game doesn't keep track of anything other than if someone is scoring.Bog is a word game where you pick words out of a bunch of letters shown. I suppose it's like a clone of Boggle. Definitely helps to have this around when there's all this crap in this disc........Cat95 for example, which isn't even a game. It tries to be a digital housepet, but it's just an animated cat following your cursor. I would discuss further things, but the application wouldn't even let me use it since it's a TRIAL.Game Chest has Backgammon, Rummy, Fortune's Favor, and Queen's Audience. I don't know how to play any of these.GNU Chess is a chess game (duh), but thankfully, it has AI this time. Too bad the graphics are still trash.Gravity Well looks impressive at first, using vector graphics in a space setting, but it doesn't explain how to play it. And I have no clue what to do.Hangman 95 is bare-bones Hangman. Self-explanatory, really.But then there's ANOTHER Hangman game in here, and this one doesn't even give you a category for the word you must solve.At least Hardwood Solitaire looks presentable, but since this is a DEMO version, you can only play regular Solitaire, something that's already possible on your computer.Klotz is Tetris with questionable controls. Made obsolete by TetrisFriends.com.As much as I'd want to see what Landmine is, the game wouldn't start.Lights is a game where you supposedly click red lights to make them green. I say "supposedly" because the game doesn't work! I clicked everywhere and nothing happened!Mac Blaster is amusing for a few seconds. It's a low-rate Space Invaders clone where you shoot Macs, but the control isn't pleasing, and the sounds are as minimal as a lot of the other games on the disc.Match32 is simply one of those Memory games with (shocker!) music. That's about it.Morejongg (Yes, that's how it's spelled) actually has decent graphics, but not as decent clicking controls.NanoCore is easily the best game in the disc so far. It's a 3D Breakout-style game. The collisions are imperfect, but still.Peg Solitaire 95 wouldn't work.PixM is ANOTHER memory match game. Too bad it also wouldn't work!Poker Broker is Poker, plain and simple.Pressure Drop actually features decent graphics, music, and sound effects! Too bad the game doesn't explain how it works. Apparenly, it isn't the arcade shooter it looks like.Puzzle-8 is a tile puzzle. Why?Star Killer wouldn't work...Solitary Confinement is, you guessed it, MORE SOLITAIRE!Not to mention Spherejongg 95 is Mahjong with spheres.And Super Marble Solitaire isn't Solitaire, but I don't know what it is.Swat is Whac-a-Mole with stock fly images.T4 is a board game, but I just couldn't make it out.Telephone Puzzle is, at last, a decent game. Words are displayed supposedly as telephone numbers, and you must scroll through sections of letters to find out what the word is.The Second Universe has to be installed first, but at this point, I just wanted to stop going through these games.Time Bomb is stupid. You must guess a number sequence. Do I need to say more?Total Recall is not related to the movie of the same name, but it is a Simon clone. And it calls itself an award winner...UltraBlast is a Breakout clone with variations. Alright, I guess.Do I really need to install Under Pressure? No thanks.Vortex is a board game that's missing a dll. Fascinating.WinFour is a bare-bones Connect Four. Finally! Something I'd probably play more than once on this disc! The AI's pretty expertly in fact.Lastly, You Don't Know Jack is the best game on the disc, because it's an actual computer game based on the game show of the same name. It has a surplus of kooky questions relating to pop culture, and it could be fun with multiple people.As a whole, however, this compilation disc is absolutely awful. It's just a bunch of shameless shareware games that beg you to pay at least $10 per game if you want to play their full versions. But why would you if the games themselves are mostly abominable? Do not get this disc at all unless you really want to play up for a fraction of You Don't Know Jack or the mediocre NanoCore.