The music is occasionally whimsical, but sometimes seems lugubrious, flatulent or both fortunately, you can turn it off. The on-line instructions for some games do not quite tell you what you need to know to make sense of them. The games do not quite fill the screen even in 640-by-480-pixel mode, and they do not resize themselves at higher resolutions, leaving a wide border that cannot be avoided on many laptop machines. If you think you are good enough to handle level 99 at the Crazy setting that is even harder than Hard, well, go right ahead. And in a welcome concession to busy adults who resent having to trudge their way back up through levels they have already mastered, these games let players choose both the difficulty level and where to begin. Like Tetris, the games in the Puzzle Collection can last awhile once you begin to get good enough to move through higher and higher levels, but they do not demand that you have as much free time as a typical 12-year-old. Trial versions of three games are available on the Web at games/puzzle/ check the caveats at q168/8/49.htm before proceeding. They are welcome antidotes to recreational software's trend toward ''realism,'' which largely amounts to ever-more-lifelike targets to shoot, kick, bludgeon and maim. The best are both easy to learn and tricky to win. The nine games on the disk all demand strategic thinking. The pack, on a CD-ROM, costs about $35 it is designed for Windows 95 computers with a 486/66 processor or better and can be installed to run entirely from your hard disk if you are willing to sacrifice about 30 megabytes of it. Its newest entry is Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, a project developed largely in Russia and overseen by Alexey Pajitnov, the Moscow-born designer of the infuriatingly addictive Tetris. THE MICROSOFT CORPORATION has long contributed to the electronic drain on America's productivity with games like Flight Simulator, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Powerpoint and Windows Reboot.
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