Rumor: Live Support Coming to Solitaire and Minesweeper

Microsoft is rumored to be adding Live functionality and Achievements to the free games that come with Windows: That's right, I'm talking about Solitaire, Minesweeper, Freecell and all the rest.

As far as I can tell, this is not a horribly late April Fool's joke: According to Joystiq, the word on the street is that all those crappy little games that come with every copy of Windows - and that have probably sapped trillions of dollars out of the worldwide GDP over the past two decades - will soon be given the full Games for Windows Live treatment, including Achievements, online chat and leaderboards.

The idea, apparently, is to gently ease new PC owners and non-gamer types into Live by building it into the games that virtually everyone gets around to trying sooner or later. Register a free GFW Live account, start building a Gamerscore by playing Spider Solitaire, meet a few people online and blammo, you're hooked. So the theory goes, anyway, and it sounds pretty solid to me.

It's only a rumor at this point, but Joystiq claims that its source has a 100 percent accuracy rating thus far, with successful predictions including Lucidity, NBA 2K10 Draft Combine and Tecmo Bowl: Throwback. True or not, Microsoft needs to do something if it wants to start building credibility for the piece of crap that is GFW Live; this would certainly be an interesting place to start.