Solitaire Review– One
When you’re down dwelling on the bottom already, you have no other place to go but climb up. Right? Apparently, no. Big Ben Interactive and Hydravision just dug deeper down the hole with their fourth classic arcade title– Solitaire. It is incomprehensible, an offense to all senses, why, oh, why does this thing happen.
Solitaire plays exactly like solitaire and we are not asking for a total reinvention of this game. Alright, you just want a solitaire game in your PSP to keep you busy while riding the bus, being stuck in a long queue or waiting for your delayed flight. It’s actually better for you to approach the nearest human being and start a conversation about the latest juices from Perez Hilton. Heck, I’ll even advise you to smoke to kill your time and yourself slowly. Solitaire games are available as freebies in mobile phones already or if not it’s easily downloadable without a fee. This particular Solitaire robs you your money and your love for humanity.
Two modes: 1-Card mode and 3-Card mode. If you don’t know how to play Solitaire, play it on your PC, it has better graphics, better controls, the tutorial actually helps and it is absolutely mind-numbingly for free. Solitaire has this very annoying game design. At first, for me at least, I don’t know how to navigate through the piles. The instructions tip that using the shoulder buttons will let you navigate the depth of the column in case there are runs that you would like to transfer to other columns. I couldn’t. So I searched for my UMDs and tried other games, I feared that my shoulder buttons are dead. I went back to playing Solitaire after verifying that my shoulder buttons are still working. I still couldn’t figure it out. After several minutes of experimenting, the instructions are actually right. The game just highlights the column in a light-blue color but the pointer remains on top of the column. It must have been my putrid eye-for-details but is it difficult to design the game of which the pointer moves along the column as you press the shoulder buttons or at least highlight the column with noticeable cues? Or how about highlighting the borders with strong colors? Even kilobytes worth of solitaire freeware implement such design.
Again, this is about chasing high-scores (actually the shortest time that you finish a game will be recorded on the table). Can they just add some special scoring system? Like punishing you with something every time you flip the deck? Or how about a timed solitaire? Please, put some challenges that make this game interesting. The soundtrack is average and for the universe’s sake why is there a 3-2-1 GO! cue before starting the game?! To provide a thrilling atmosphere? Great. Should I shudder now?
The graphics are not horrible, they’re just lazy. When automating the arrangement of suite stacks by pressing the Triangle button, it doesn’t even animate. It will just VOILA!…instant teleportation. May I remind you that the MS Solitaire does animate the cards when stacking.
What can I say? Just don’t buy this game.
Score Updated
1/10 (Hey, I can play solitaire in my mobile phone for free with three variations. And beautiful graphics.)
LOL!!!!
The entry for this title in the games list gives it that 1970 default date (which, if true, would at least give the game an excuse for its lack of animation). Also, I noticed that Hydravision’s Labyrinth has the wrong review score (4 instead of 3) shown in the games list.
Incidentally . . . are you sure you’re not being unfairly harsh? I mean, 0 is a depth to which most review scales don’t even go. Are you certain you’re not letting Hydravision’s other failures tinge this one? For comparative purposes, how much better is the solitaire in Grip Games’ 5-in-1 Arcade Hits than this one?
Fixed the wrong entries.
Yes, this is absolutely zero. It is impossible to compare the Solitaire with the solitaire in the 5-in-1. I mean, they have the same price. If you want to play solitaire, just buy the ones with 4 more games.
I still haven’t finished one single solitaire game on easy…
Couldn’t agree more with the review. This is just lazy.
In fact I would go as far to say that this kind of game will give minis a bad name. The guy over at openemotion asked the question how much content is acceptable. Well I can honestly say this is not acceptable.
Well, I didn’t mean the value part of the evaluation, because it’s obvious that 5-in-1 Arcade is a much better value than any 1-in-1 Arcade.
I’m not trying to defend what Hydravision made, and it’s clearly a bad game. It’s just that 0 is the absolute bottom. As in: “It is not possible for them to have made this game worse without actually trying.” I point out that there are literally broken games out there that have gotten scores higher than 0 from other review outlets. E.g., that PC truck racing game in which there are no other racers besides you (among a horde of other issues), or the DS version of Deal or No Deal which gives the same briefcase distribution every time you turn on the game (i.e., a game of chance that’s giving you a 100% success rate). Some reviewers of those games apparently felt the games could possibly have been worse, so they gave them greater-than-0 scores. Thus, I ask for this review: do you truly feel that this is really as low as they could have gone? That is what the 0 means. If your answer is yes, then the 0 score for this game is fine by me.
0? i assume a game would have to unplayable to score so low. even finger connection with absolutely no gameplay besides a colour wheel scored better than this.
though i understand you’re trying to give a strong warning, isn’t 0 reserved for games that shouldn’t be played even if they were free? if the game were dirt cheap it would still be a functional albeit lackluster game
that being said the screenshots won’t load on my psp… can it be that bad?
I haven’t played the game, but from the review I can tell that the player gets frustrated by simply playing the game, which is sad. Giving it a 0/10 may seem harsh, on the other hand, is 1/10 really that much better? I personally think that verbal ratings (trash – bad – mediocre – good – excellent, …) are much better than just an abstract number.
To comment on the comparison to 5-in-1 Arcade Hits’ Solitaire… “our” Solitaire looks a lot better and the controls are much better so it does not stand in the way of gameplay. That’s the difference. On the paper, the games may seem the same, but the feel is obviously very different.
…and the winner in the “worst mini ever” catagory is!…
This game looks extremely basic and would have benefited from more polish and options/features IMHO. As it is, it is a functional utilitarian verison of Solitaire. I don’t mind that fact, as usually I prefer a simple uncluttered game mechanic anyway, however this particular Mini should be way way cheaper.
I think Big Ben should release all four of their recent arcade clones in a single package, priced at something like £2. Then they would be on to a winner, as this would be a much better proposition.
I much prefer the Solitaire that comes with 5-in-1 Arcade Hits
Big Ben Interactive are extracting the urine – maybe it’s time their devkit was confiscated as they clearly don’t have anything to offer us gamers..
I expect we’ll see more games from Big Ben. The ones they’ve released so far have been ports of their DS games, and guess what? They have more.