Monday, July 09, 2007

Soltrio Solitaire (360)

So ages ago I was going to write an update about a nice little Live Arcade card game, but then I got sidetracked by stupid things like becoming addicted to a nice little Live Arcade card game.

Soltrio Solitaire is excellent because it takes all of the hassle out of card games, but adds no extra hassle. The presentation is clean and easy to follow, with fonts, colours, and cards all being well designed and easily readable. The cards all animate about the place nicely enough, and very crucially you don't have to wait for an animation to play out in order to do your next move, so you're never frustrated by the speed of the presentation holding you back.

It has in-game help for every variation of solitaire (and Christ there are a lot of them. Who knew?), and if the rules don't make it quite clear you can just keep asking the game to suggest moves until the legal moves do click. So even if you don't know how to play "3 Deck Easthaven" you'll soon pick it up.


It also has a series of "life lines" that let you do things like shuffle certain rows of cards, move any card back to the pile, or add extra shuffles. This might seem like a small addition, but I think for a casual game it's an excellent addition - if you're only one wrong card away from a victory, the game lets you cheat. Because let's face it, playing a single player game of cards is all about me winning with as much cheating as I see fit.

Best of all they keep adding new packs with around 10 sets of game rules on what seems to be a regular basis.

It's one of those implementations (like the Sudoku in Brain Training) that makes you wonder how they got it so right, and how people can get it so badly wrong (like that other Sudoku DS game that I can't quite remember the name of).

1 comment:

JC Barnett said...

You're thinking of Hudson's atrocious Sudoku DS title. Even at the low end of the price range it was a rip-off. Ugh.

And blast your eyes. I have been resisting the temptation buying the full version of Solitaire. And now, because some random blogger I dont know says it's good I have no other recourse than to buy the damned thing. Thanks a lot....