It’s not all that much better when it comes to the games themselves, either. The single-player experience is either trivial or frustrating, and there’s really no point in playing these games by Game Link when you can just get out a piece of paper and play them by hand. Unlike
Tetris, all of the ones available are easy to do without a game system.
Gobs of Games offers you a few different ‘groups’ of games to play. You can engage in Peg Games, which involve jumping pegs and generally ending with a given peg in a specific spot. You can also do Paper Games (my favorite), where you can play Hangman, Dots and Boxes and its triangular cousin, and a game they call Color Snakes, but I’ve always called Crossings. Eh. There’s also a Puzzles section, with the requisite sliding-tile game and the aforementioned Sokoban derivative. And, lastly, there’s Checkers.
The A.I. in Gobs of Games is all over the map. It’s near perfect in Dots and Boxes and Triangles, requiring you to be exceedingly careful in every play. On the other hand, I’ve never lost a game of either Snakes or Color Snakes (which, by the way, are not related to each other in any way). Both are mildly entertaining, but once you’ve beaten the computer consistently ten times in a row, there’s not much point. I’ve never been a big fan of the Peg Game genre, and the fact that the major difference between most of them is that you start and end in different spots (wow!) makes it all the less interesting. And why, oh why, is Tic Tac Toe in here? Not even 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, just plain ol’ 3x3. Ugh. The Boxes puzzle game is neat, but it has way, way too little documentation in the manual to explain how to play it. And sliding puzzles... eh.
The only really redeeming thing on Gobs of Games is the Checkers game, which is actually pretty solid. I found myself entertained by it long after I had stopped playing the rest of the titles on the cart, but it still didn’t really satisfy me. It was all right, but not excellent.
