Big Fun with Big Solitaires 3D - Review

[Railwaymodeler]

When most people think of solitaire on the PC, they think of the venerable game that has been bundled with Windows since version 3.1.

Big Solitaires is very different. While you can still play solitaire, as well as freecell, there are many, many more options to make your game more interesting and playable.

While veteran card players might recognize the many variants of solitaire and freecell, there are some I, for one, have never seen. This makes for more to discover with this game.

The 3D view is well done, it is a top-down-ish view, like what you may have at the card table. This makes the game more realistic. Card movement is very smooth, but this will depend on your graphics and other PC hardware. On a laptop with a 32 MB Intel 815 series graphics adapter, and a Pentium 3 1 GHz processor, the game is very playable, but a desktop with a 64 MB GeForce 4 video card and AMD Athlon CPU, showed better, smoother graphics.

One thing I did not see, that would have made the game interesting, would be scoring kept in terms of dollars. The Windows solitaire game had this feature, and I do miss this feature.

The game does keep track of number of moves, as well as frames per second (A measure of how well the graphics display).

In all, this game is excellent for traditional card gamers, who want something beyond what came bundled with Windows.