Old School

There was once a day when you could purchase logic and puzzle games at your local EB and CompUSA (apologies to those living outside the United States, insert your local computer store here). Puzzle games would be reviewed in the gaming magazines. People would get excited about a new release. They were real computer games.

Those days are gone. I don't claim to even begin to understand the economics of the computer gaming business. Whatever economic forces are at work have resulted in commercial game makers leaving this genre. Today, puzzle games are distributed entirely through on-line shareware sites.

This week I am going to do a dangerous thing. I am listing the twenty best commercial logic and puzzle games ever (in my opinion of course), along with one link for each game. These are the games you should grab if you see them while digging through the bargain bin or hunting around in a friend's closet. Almost all of these games are from the 90s, but they are all still good, fun, playable games. Puzzle and logic games do not lose their value the way other games do. Over time, I hope to review many of these games as space permits. I especially want to get to those that run without issues in WindowsXP.

The 20 Best Logic/Puzzle Games Ever:

• Brix
• Castle of Dr. Brain
• Contraption Zack
• Clockwerx
• D/Generation
• Gobliiins series
• Gruntz
• Heaven & Earth
• Hodj & Podj
• Icebreaker
• Incredible Machine
• Jewels II
• Lemmings
• Loderunner
• Marble Drop
• Norse by Norsewest
• Oxyd
• Pit Droids
• Smart Games series
• Zillions of Games

Most of these games cannot be purchased any more. A few can, and I have given links for those ones. However, many of them can be found in the murky world of abandonware. Here is a article on the ethics and legality of abandonware. If you are not bothered by this, you can find abandonware sites, do a Google search on "abandonware".