GameSpot's James Yu wrote a great article called "Windows Vista Free Games" going over some of the differences between the new Inbox games (the games that ship "In the Box", you know, the free ones) in Vista compared to the games in Windows XP. James even put pictures of the XP versions in there if you mouse over them (nothing so fancy here, but I stole his image of Freecell).

What the article, and more specifically, the images, fail to capture is how much better the animations are in these games. Here's an anecdote for you: I had a good friend of mine visiting from Atlanta not too long ago, who is a Mac user but really only uses the Mac to do Email and surf the web. I introduced him to Windows Vista running on my laptop, and he immediately wanted to check out the games. He's addicted to Freecell. He sat there playing Freecell in Vista until the battery ran out (even though it's a monster Dell, it lasted about 2 hours).

The next day I came home from work and he immediately asked to get his hands on my laptop again. I had it booted into XP from earlier in the day, so I just loaded up the Freecell that ships with XP. Within 30 seconds he said "No, change it, I want that other version, it's better".

It makes sense that the new games would look, feel, and play better, but you don't really get to fully appreciate them until you play them. And yeah, I know that a ton of you hardcore guys (like the guys that posted in the GameSpot comments) are going to say "Great, pretty games I'll never play. Who cares?" But Solitaire on Windows is probably the #1 game played in the world, and it's games like these Inbox games that get people to click on the Games option in the Start Menu, get 'im hooked, and before long they're installing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. After all, you gotta start somewhere!