Game Boy Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] The Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack (Conspiracy Entertainment, 2001)

Where do you want to go with your GBC today?

The fact that there is not one, but two very real Microsoft-branded Game Boy Color games is frankly more fascinating than anything about the carts themselves. To Windows users of a certain vintage, the Entertainment Packs are casual gaming royalty, and even if you've never played one, you've certainly played Minesweeper or FreeCell in Windows itself, both of which came from the Entertainment Packs. Best of nicely rebuilds a handful of them for the GBC, though it'd held back by its oddball and kinda lackluster game selection (should've added JezzBall). Where it's good, though, it's at least as entertaining as Clubhouse Games.

FreeCell is the best game on here, a mind-bending twist on solitaire where all cards are visible at once and you get four open cells for temporarily holding cards, but you can only move one card at a time. While theoretically all games are winnable, I find it a hell of a lot more difficult than normal solitaire, but plenty satisfying to fidget with nonetheless. Tut's Tomb is a version of pyramid solitaire that I didn't find as engaging, given the weird mechanic where only the three draw variant can reuse the draw pile (you thus choose between using the pile only once or having draw cards locked off from you), and TriPeaks is a weird scoring-focused actiony variant of solitaire that itched my brain.

You'd think SkiFree would be a slam dunk on the GBC, but I found it difficult to control, easy to cheese by spamming the jump button, and not very satisfying at all. Minesweeper is always fun, even if the d-pad is a poor substitute for a mouse. Life Genesis is a whole Game of Life simulator, mesmerizing if an absolutely bizarre fit for the GBC, and TicTactics is, well, 3D tic-tac-toe with predictably lame results. There's enough fun to be had and care put into these versions that I can't truly knock it, though, even if I have zero idea who it was aimed at or who would like it other than vintage Microsoft spergs like me. And, again—the main menu looks like Windows 95. That's fascinating.