I was looking for software to learn Shogi with and not having any luck, when I stumbled upon Zillons of Games. Its a package with some kind of a ‘universal game engine’ in it. I d/led the demo and before too long shelled out $25-ish to unlock the whole game. Messed with it a bit last night but didn’t get too far.

Well at lunch today I d/led it to my work machine (and registered it…which technically might be evil but I know I’ll never be playing both copies at once).

I’m pretty happy with the purchase now that I’ve had more time to mess with it. Granted the interfaces can be a bit clunky since they’re generic, and its isn’t a gorgeous game. But there’re a ton of games I haven’t played since I was a kid and its fun to go and revisit them. Lots of solo games, too, like Towers of Hanoi, Knight Chase, that infuriating game where you have to toggle off all the lights but you can only turn them on/off in clusters and so on.

Go, however, seems pretty clunky I’m afraid. You have to use a drop-down menu to pass, and often the AI opponent moves behind the menu and it can be hard to see where it went. Also, at the ‘PushOver’ difficulty level, it doesn’t know when to quit, but maybe its ‘smarter’ at higher levels.

Basically, I’m pretty confident I’ll get my $25 worth of fun out of it, even if I don’t d/l any extra games or make any of my own.

You can probably find many of these games elsewhere, either on websites as Flash games or as freeware/shareware downloads, but having them all in one package is pretty convenient. Zillions-of-Games gets the DC Seal of Approval.

Oh, but sadly its only available for Windows. 🙁