Classic Games Overload: Card and Puzzle Edition

Genre: Compilation / Card Game / Puzzle

Players: 1-4 Competitive / Team Competitive (Local Wireless), Download Play Supported

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Review:

Classic Games Overload is a Compilation of Card and Puzzle games released on Nintendo 3DS in 2012. This game includes 226 different Card and Puzzle games, including 202 different types of Solitaire. And while those numbers are partly comprised of minor variants, for the most part those are completely separate games.

Under the heading of Card Games, you can play 11 games: Bridge, Canasta, Crazy Eights, Cribbage, Euchre, Gin Rummy, Go Fish, Hearts, Romme, Skat, and Spades.

Under the heading of Poker, you can play 7 games: 5 Card Draw, 7 Card Stud, Crazy Pineapple, Double Flop Hold’em, Omaha, Pineapple, and Texas Hold’em.

Under the heading of Video Poker, you can play 5 games: Deuces Wild, Double Bonus, Double Double, Jacks or Better, and Jokers Wild.

Under the heading of BlackJack, players can play Players vs Bank (with variants for 1-5 players)

Under the heading of Solitaire, players can play 202 different types of Solitaire Card games. They are as follows: Aces and Kings, Aces Square, Aces Up, Ace-to-King, Acme, Acquaintance, Agnes Bernauer, Alaska, Algerian Patience, Ali Baba, American Toad, Antares, Arizona, Auld Lang Syne, Aunt Mary, Australian Patience, Baker’s Dozen, Baker’s Game, Baroness, Bastion, Batsford, Beetle, Beleaguered Castle, Betsy Ross, Big Forty, Binary Star, Black Hole, Black Widow, Blind Alleys, Blockade, Blondes and Brunettes, Bristol, Busy Aces, Calculation, Canfield, Canister, Carlton, Castles in Spain, Challenge FreeCell, Chameleon, Citadel, Clover Leaf, Congress, Contradance, Cornelius, Corners, Corona, Crescent, Cruel, Curds and Whey, Demon, Demons and Thieves, Deuces, Dieppe, Diplomat, Double Canfield, Double Easthaven, Double Fourteens, Double FreeCell, Double Klondike, Double Pyramid, Double Rail, Double Scorpion, Double Yukon, Doublets, Duchess, Duke, Eagle Wing, Easthaven, Eight by Eight, Eight Off, Elevens, Falling Star, Family Plot, Famous Fifty, Fan, Fifteen Puzzle, Fifteen Rush, Five Piles, Florentine Patience, Flower Garden, ForeCell, Fortress, Fortune’s Favor, Forty and Eight, Forty Thieves, Four Colors, Four Seasons, Fours Up, Fourteen Out, FreeCell, Free Fan, Frog, Gargantua, German Patience, Giant, Giza, Gold Rush, Golf, Good Measure, Great Wheel, Grounds for Divorce, Harp, Heads and Tails, Hypotenuse, Indian, Indian Patience, Intelligence, Interregnum, Josephine, King Albert, King Tut, Kings, Kings and Queens, Klondike, La Belle Lucie, Lady Cadogan, Lady Jane, Lady Palk, Limited, Little Forty, Little Napoleon, Lucas, Maria, Martha, Midshipman, Milligan Cell, Miss Milligan, Monte Carlo, Mount Olympus, Moving Left, Needle, Nestor, New York, Northwest Territory, Number Ten, Odd and Even, Osmosis, Parliament, Patient Pairs, Penguin, Penta, Perpetual Motion, Perseverance, Preference, Putt Putt, Pyramid, Quadrangle, Raglan, Rainbow, Rank and File, Red and Black, Repair, Rouge et Noir, Royal Family, Royal Parade, Russian Solitaire, Scorpion, Scotch Patience, Sea Towers, Seven by Seven, Shamrocks, Simple Simon, Simplicity, Sir Tommy, Sixes and Sevens, Somerset, Spanish Patience, Spider, Spider Cells, Spider One Suit, Spider Two Suits, Spider Web, Spiderette, Spidlike, Stalactites, Steps, Steve, Stonewall, Storehouse, Strategy, Streets and Alleys, Sultan of Turkey, Super Flower Garden, Superior Canfield, Taj Mahal, Tam O’Shanter, Tarantella, Tarantula, The Plot, Thieves of Egypt, Trefoil, Tuxedo, Twin Queens, Unlimited, Variegated Canfield, Vertical, Waning Moon, West Cliff, Whitehead, Windmill, and Yukon.

Under the heading of Mahjong, players can only play Solitaire-style Mahjong, but there are 404 different tile layouts (which I won’t list here).

Under the heading of Tangram, players have 505 different puzzles to choose from.

Under the heading of Picture Puzzle, players have 101 puzzles to choose from across three difficulties.

Yeah, so… that’s a lot. Clearly, this game is aiming for quantity… but how’s the quality?

Because the games in this collection are all classic real-world games, rather than telling you what I think about those games, I’ll tell you about the presentation, options, features, and controls.

When it comes to the presentation, the card games have 2D representations of the cards on the bottom screen, with the top screen either having 3D representations of those same cards, or in multiplayer games like Poker, a simple 3D rendering of the table and your opponents, with human opponents represented by their respective Miis, and AI-controlled opponents looking like similarly-simple cartoony 3D characters.

While these mostly work for what this game is aiming to do, the animations on these characters are pretty bad, with tapping on the table to signify a “check” in poker being laughably slow and artificial. What’s worse, this slows down the game’s pacing considerably, and contributes to games with AI-only opponents taking absurdly long as you wait for players who provide no justifiable reason to make you wait.

Non card games are presented in a similarly simple fashion, with simple 2D that’s enough to represent what it’s aiming for, and perhaps a simple 3D version of that on the top screen, but nothing more than that. You do at least have some options for different aesthetics for backgrounds in the game’s menus, but not the cards themselves (or tiles, in mahjong’s case). You also have a selection of simple synthesized tunes to select from, but I found all of them to be unimpressive and annoying.

Apart from the aesthetics, most of the included games offer a variety of options for how you want to play them, with solitaire games offering different variants and poker giving players a few pre-made selections of different minimum/maximum bets. In addition, this game can also track your statistics over time, so you can see your time or score in various games, and games where betting is involved include one consistent dollar amount you carry from one game to the next, or even across different games. And the included support for not only multiplayer but Download Play as well is extremely welcome.

The controls here are decent, but nothing extraordinary. Players can use the touchscreen to move cards or make selections, or they can alternately use the D-Pad or Circle Pad and buttons, though this seems a little clunky. There are also on-screen buttons to undo a move, get a hint, or use the in-game menu, but these buttons are extraordinarily tiny and hard to hit if you’re not using the stylus.

Apart from complaints about the presentation and minor gripes about the controls, the only other issue I have to add here is that while this game nominally says it’s a Card and Puzzle game collection, the Puzzle games here are outnumbered 224 to 2 (assuming we see Mahjong as a Card Game). Really, this Compilation would have been much more accurately-labeled if it just stuck to including the Card Games in the title and left the Tangrams and Picture Puzzle stuff as a nice bonus.

Overall, while I do have a few complaints about the presentation, controls, and a few other issues in Classic Games Overload, those complaints are far, far outweighed by a good selection of options and an absolutely staggering number of (mostly Card) games, including what I wouldn’t be surprised to discover is every version of Solitaire in existence. It’s light on the “Puzzle” side of things, and there’s certainly room for improvement, but it’s hard to complain with the absolutely staggeringly massive number of games included here. If you’re looking for a Collection of Card Games on your Nintendo 3DS, especially Solitaire games, consider this game an absolute must-have.

tl;dr – Classic Games Overload is a Compilation that includes over 200 different games (overwhelmingly Card Games, and the majority of those being different kinds of Solitaire), with a pretty good selection of options. There are some issues with the presentation, controls, and a few other things, but those are far outweighed by the absolutely massive number of games included here. If you want a Collection of Card Games on your Nintendo 3DS, you absolutely need to own this game.

Grade: B+

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