Product: Windows Millennium Edition
Company: Microsoft
Website: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsme
Estimated Street Price: Full Version: $209 - Upgrade Version: $109
Buy Windows Me Now - Low Price
Review By: Byron Hinson & Julien Jay

Games & Gaming

Windows Me now comes with new games, however old good games like the solitaire, minesweeper and freecell are included as well as the spider solitaire of Plus! 98 is also included. The spider solitaire has been enhanced as users can choose the difficulty of the game they want to start. But the new thing is that Windows Me includes several multiplayer internet oriented games: indeed users can start a reversi game and play over the net through the MSN GameZone with computer or human opponents. It is funny even if during a game players cannot exchange customized messages: they can only choose predefined sentences in a list. A chat feature would be appreciated!

Windows Me also now includes new Gaming Options as shown below. This lets you change controllers, controller ID's and setup voice chats in games. We only ran into one problem with all of the games we tried on Windows Me and that was in the newly released title MDK 2. It is now a known problem with this final version of MDK 2 and it is believed that Microsoft are currently working on a fix, we must note however that it doesn't happen for everyone.

Another thing I noticed is that the version of DirectX 7 seems to be more stable than the previous 7a released to the public a few months ago, and indeed the version numbers are higher, but having a version of DirectX integrated into the operating system does tend help out with stability.