Jigsaw's Blog: My thoughts on games (and other stuff)

Soltrio Solitaire Mini Review

While I was waiting around for the Halo 3 beta to be release last night I took some time to check out Soltrio Solitaire even though I knew I was not going to buy the full version. The game looks decent enough, but I never though the graphics would be an issue. My biggest issue with this game is that they are charging $10 for a set of 18 versions of solitaire. $10 may not sound like a lot of money, but when I can play the same games on my PC for free it is. Not only can I play them free on my PC, but they play better on my PC. Because there is no mouse to play with on the Xbox 360 they have setup the game so that when you move the controller around the screen to select cards it jumps from card to card instead of moving around freely. I found this extremely frustrating because it slowed down how fast I could play the game. They tried to compensate for this somewhat by giving you a quick play button. By moving the cursor over a card and hitting B it would play that in the best available spot. The problem with this is that if there are multiple places the card could play you have no control with this method on where the card goes. Instead you have to pick up the card with the A button and painstakingly move it where you want it. When I play card games I want to go from play to play as fast as possible. So, I was glad to see they included options to speed up the animations, but even on the fastest setting the animations were still to slow for my tastes. After about 5 minutes I was getting pissed about how slow the game plays. The achievements for Soltrio Solitaire are pretty standard with some you could get easily and others you’re going to have to work for. However, even if you are a big solitaire fan this game is just to cumbersome to play for more than a game or two. The only case I can see for recommend getting this game is if you have a spouse/girlfriend/mistress that you want to get into console gaming and they really like solitaire. In that case it might be worth the $10 to get them to play on your Xbox 360, but keep in mind that if they get into console gaming you may end up having to shell out another $400 bucks for a second Xbox 360.

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