Customer Reviews

Hoyle Puzzle & Board Games 2008 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Excellent collection of puzzles...great audio and video effects, and the games are simple enough for general usage and complex enough for interest and stimulation.

ONLY negative is that when activated the games take over your entire screen, and cannot be "reduced" to run in background.

I've never bought Hoyle software before, but this package offers mucho bang for the buck, given that most downloadable shareware games are $20 per game. There are several addictive games in here, and they run flawlessly on my Mac Pro as well as my G4.

I have only 3 complaints in order of increasing importance:

1. The graphics are quite low-res and lack the beauty of many of the new games for Mac that adopt the elegant graphical style of the OS.
2. The rules for all the games are in a single pdf file, so if you click on rules, you have to wait for a pdf reader to load and then search a large document to find your game.
3. There's little progression in games as you play longer and better. There are high scores in a menu, but each game is basically the same thing over and over, so you never get a sense of progressing through higher levels. Some games have more difficult levels to choose from, but if you select a certain level and play for an hour, you get no sense in terms of points or levels reached that you've accomplished anything.

But if you want a large variety of mindless games for your Mac, there is no better deal than this.

I've loved the Hoyle game series (Card Games, Casino, and Puzzle & Board Games)for many years. But, the last Mac versions were released in 2002 and were only compatible with OS 9. These older versions were still playable on pre-Intel Macs, but the newer Macs with Intel chips no longer have compatibility with pre-Mac OS X software.

Finally, the long wait is over and new versions of the excellent Hoyle Games are available for today's Mac users! :-)

The real tragedy is that this could have been a top notch game if programmed correctly. It seems as though in any of the games that are based on chance, particularly the ones that use dice rolls, the game seems to be programmed to choose a "lucky" player at the beginning of the game. That player will roll doubles every other turn, or high numbers or whatever that player happens to need. You can tell who the "lucky" player is within a few turns. I can tell within 5 or 6 moves in one of these games who is going to win. It really makes the game very boring after a while and not much fun to play. It's gotten so annoying that I only play the games that rely on skill only and don't play any of the games where luck comes into play.

I know it is possible to do a good job programming software for random selection because I have played many good games of this type. It is just a shame that the programmers who work for Encore(the company that makes this game)are either too lazy or not skilled enough to create such a program. Because this could have been a great game instead of the waste of money that it is.

The game may claim to work with OS X, but that's stretching the definition of compatible. If you have multiple users with their own account, each user must register the product separately, and cannot see the other scoreboards.

In just an hour or so of play, the chess product was revealed to be buggy, especially about end game rules. It declared a draw due to insufficient material when the human player had a queen, a rook, a knight, and a pawn or two. (There were also legal moves for the computer player). The mahjongg tiles product was trying to do matches against buried tiles.

Don't expect even a passable chess opponent on the normal difficulty setting. As an unrated chess player, I should find the normal mode at least a passable game, instead of beating it so readily as to be boring.

I haven't even had the time to look at the other games. We wanted a couple of the popular board games, a decent mahjongg solitaire game, and maybe one or two more. Instead, we got what might eventually be a usable product, but certainly isn't one yet.

The scoreboard was more primitive than what I'd find on the freebie mahjongg games that come with some Linux desktops.

The patch that is listed on their website is a Windows .exe, no mention made of a Mac patch. If you want a Mac puzzle/board game, don't select with this product unless you are truly desperate, or have tried many other options and they are even worse.

Bought 2007 when it first came out. Hayed it and got ride of it. This one works great on my Micro XP Home Edition! It combines the prior puzzle and board games with some new ones. Good fast service !!

If you own an older version, I would recommend you stay with what you have. The graphics have been improved but the sound effects in the new version, specifically Triple Yacht are annoying.

This is a DVD, not a CD. If you don't have a DVD drive, you can't use it!

First I have 2003, and upgraded to 2008 and am glad I did not uninstall 2003.
Cons my favorite game isn't in 2008. My major con is moving pieces in games like checkers and pachisi. it takes a about a minute sometimes to get a piece to be released where you want it to go and twice now in pachisi when I was trying (my last piece both times) to get a piece in the home stretch, I must have put I too near the regular area and it planted the piece around the board, so the piece would have to go around again. In checkers, and I checked that it was a legal move, it wouldn't release at all.
Pro a lot of new games

There are quite a number of bugs in this game. The most noticeable ones are:
1) In chess, the game will frequently end on a 3x repetition when this has not occurred (and usually when pounding the computer)! Come on - it gave me that once after I captured a piece!
2) In pachisi, it is very difficult to move the pieces - it frequently does not register where you have dropped it.
3) Many of the Hoyle Bucks goals do not register when they occur.

There are other minor irritants, but these three are the major ones.