There are 20 types of games included on the CD-ROM--something for everyone, really. If your forte is logic you'll enjoy Take a Seat, which lets you populate an airliner by seating people according to certain rules. Enjoy word games? Word Flip, Word Loops, or one of the several other challenges of this type will keep you busy. One of our favorite alternative puzzles was Stepping Tones, where we had to piece together entire songs by putting sound bytes in the correct order.

All the puzzles start out easily enough, but the difficulty level ramps up steeply in a short number of levels. Games include up to 100 levels, so unless you are a particularly well-rounded genius there's little chance you'll be wearing this game out anytime soon. Even if you do, more levels are available on the Internet.

The real problem we had with Smart Games 3 was getting stuck at a particular level of difficulty in each puzzle. Once we hit the upper limit our brains could handle, there was no way to generate similar puzzles at that level of difficulty. Still, it was interesting to see how far we could get in one type of game compared to the relatively small amount of progress we were able to make in others. If you like puzzlers, Smart Games 3 should satisfy for some time. For everyone else the game ultimately amounts to pure mental torture, but getting there is pretty fun. --T. Byrl Baker

Pros:

• Variety of puzzle types means there's something for everyone

• Difficulty gets out of control in a short amount of time
• Only certified geniuses can hope to complete all these puzzles