Triple-A Minesweeper
minesweeper.mikelacher.com
minesweeper.mikelacher.com
Incidentally, as of Windows 8, Microsoft replaced OG Minesweeper with an overdesigned mobile game-inspired app with daily challenges and in-game purchases[1].
I've been carrying the orignal versions of Minesweeper and Solitaire from (checks Properties) Windows NT 3.51 in my "random bin" directory for years, chosen, I believe, because they're 32-bit, have none of the graphical changes introduced in later versions, and don't rely on any non-core system DLLs. They still run fine under Windows 11, though you have to jump through hoops to open their help files (namely, dig up a copy of winhlp32.exe and open them from within it, because modern Windows versions block the ability to add file associations for .hlp files, instead redirecting to a series of progressively less useful web sites).
[1] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfhwcn?hl=en-US&gl=U...
Available for linux, mobile, online and of course static-linked exe. Also as opposed to Windows Minesweeper, mines.exe is guaranteed to be solvable every time.
Maybe lean into some of the metal gear solid dialogue by having a long back and forth about "What's a mine?" "What do you mean 'mark a mine'?" "How do I know when I'm done?" etc.
Here is the forest temple video which is a short sample of what to expect: https://youtu.be/KC656o7_zVk
It's probably a bit too far, but nevertheless enjoyable for the comedic effect.
I've never been able to put my thumb on it, and I just chalked it up to me being older now, but I'm not a big fan of a lot of games. And this video opened the curtains as to why. Just so much hand holding and noise.
It ruined the game for me, because I never felt like I was let free to actually play the game.
Title screen video gives a vague story. Game starts. No dialog. No text. Just ... clicking and discovering the rest of the story.
But also yes, I did enjoy Myst. It's also what I enjoyed about Minecraft when it first came out. You just had to figure your shit out or get killed by zombies.
Now if you're paying full price for a game you've at least had the ability to read reviews and you know it's going to be half price in a year but you want it now. You also have tens of thousands of other games to pick from in basically any genre you want, accessible more or less on demand.
Now, just click and buy. Done. No fun, no excitement. And the games are all focused on achievements and completion of inane fetch quests.
High quality? Hmmmm.
Also don't rose-colored-glasses older games either, there was a lot of absolute trash. Bargain bins existed for a reason. That said just because a game is bad doesn't mean it isn't still fun in some way, even if for its brokenness. There's an entire genre of games these days where the basic principle is "if you find a bug, but it's funny, it's now a feature".
This was true back then too. Computer Gaming World dates back to 81. Also the software stores that I (i.e., my parents) shopped at back then discounted older titles. This is why I got to play through the Castle of Dr. Brain after the Island of Dr. Brain was released.
well, now you're just making things up
They’re not niche geeky things, they are the most mass of mass media. Their target market includes the the people for whom the “do not ingest” label appears on bottles of bleach, as well as the parents for whom the “this is not a toy” appears in huge letters on plastic packaging bags.
Of course they have to say things in the simplest possible language, repeated 3 times in text AND audio. Otherwise half of their audience will be confused and frustrated, because they have two digit IQs.
"X... button?"
"Focus, Sweeper! Sweeper? SWEEPEEEER!"
Without a 200gb download size how do I know this game is good? How in 2026 does a predominantly single player game not have additional forced downloads for its multiplayer mode? I am a pro gamer, why is there no deluxe version priced twice as high as the base game without additional content? Speaking of deluxe versions, how am I supposed to buy more virtual currency packs to speed up my leveling? No Battle Royale Mode placed above the fold in the game menu?
This is single-A at best.
My advice? Wait for the remaster 5 years from now. Or re-purchase it on the next console generation to at least get a AA experience.
For me this is the biggest complaint about some games where instead of making a player think what to do and how to navigate game, player basically gets "click her" "go that way" "click that" "congrats you won"
so i think this is the parody aspect of this minesweeper.
Cant imagine current AAA games allowing player to be stuck for days trying to solve the problem like good old times of monkey island or leisure suit larry
I think part of it has to do with reasonable software design principles around affordances and discoverability making their way to game dev. I think the relationship of user::app is completely different from that of player::game. When a user takes 2min to find the button that means the button should be easier to find. When a player takes 2min to find the chest, it could mean a lot of things but it doesn’t necessarily mean the chest needs to be easier to find.
That’s my morning subway take, at least.
(Answer: some. I'm struggling to recall which game does this, but there's definitely a game where if you solve the first level in 40 seconds or less — numbers might well be wrong, but it's something like that — then the game assumes you've played it before and quietly skips the tutorial without making a big deal about it. But all too few AAA games will do that.)
I've been thinking about it and I think the best gaming experiences I've had were the ones with the least hand-holding; or rather, where the hand-holding was best integrated truly and nearly invisibly into the environment.
Elden Ring, Outer Wilds, Fez, Animal Well, Rain World, Chants of Sennarr, Axiom Verge, Path of Achra, Caves of Qud, Disco Elysium, Noita. OG Minecraft before there were tutorials. I've been trying to find similar titles.
One of my friends played on hard mode to challenge himself. One played on easy to build a proto-Factorio without interruption. Both valid ways.
It's been a growing problem for two decades now.
[0] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/495903
[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/558516, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2Z23SAFVA
You can get some royalty fee's reduced by launching on Epic Games Store but that's it.
Most Unreal Engine games are distributed by Steam.
ALSO, fun fact while we're here.. to display the Unreal Engine logo on startup you're supposed to ask Epic Games for permission; but since it's the default project splash screen (meant to be replaced) people just assume that they want the publicity and that it's part of using the engine- Epic doesn't feel like enforcing this because they don't see the point.
So, feel free to remove it, and if you see it, just know that the developers very likely didn't read the agreement they signed when they started using the Engine :)
Source: the last unreal engine technical advisory board in Stockholm; I too didn't read this from the agreement ...
Bonus points if the launcher is the only thing blocking it from working properly on Proton.
Or if it's a multiplayer game that, when it crashes, by the time you get past the crash reporter, the unskippable launcher, the unskippable logos, the unskippable epilepsy warning, and the unskippable title screen intro animation, the window for reconnecting without penalty will have passed.
It's often a cover to mask loading times anyway.
"What happens then?"
"Nothing. You just suck."
I’d be shocked if we don’t have mainstream games with AI voices soon.
I want to use voice synthesis to read my blog articles out loud to me as a self-editing step, but the experience was nothing like a human when I last tried.
The voices sounded natural-ish alright, but intonation was all over the place.
On https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-speech/models, you can plot speech preference ELO and pronunciation correctness against price.
Gemini 3.8 Flash / Flash-Lite TTS seem good, for example, they lie on the frontier of both.
This is Art.
Largely replaced by social media, I suppose, including of course HN.
Exactly what you want, organized and broad. And also dead.
Bravo overall, nailed many tropes of modern gaming.
Thank you for making this. Biting commentary on modern video games.
Sidequest to sweep 10 mines.
Achievement after sweeping 5 mines
The yellow diamond is nice but what if I don't notice the diamond? I need a colored scent trail leading from my cursor to the yellow diamond, and a pinging noise when my cursor is near a mine
Mocapped mines
Jack Quaid
$70
https://bsky.app/profile/mikelacher.bsky.social/post/3mxepyw...
- Checkpoints after each mine
- DLC for rounded corners
I feel like there's some reference to the recent Wolverine game and it's unfailable driving sequences in that ...
I used to play a lot of games in high school but didn't find the time for them once I started working and now, after about a 15 year hiatus, got curious and have been playing God of War, Expedition 33, High on Life and enhanced editions of slightly older titles like GTA 5 and BioShock 2. The cinematic experience of God of War, the hints in the environmental lighting about what direction to go in Expedition 33, the popovers in GTA that remind you of what the left joystick does again, the repeated voiceovers that explain what each gun does in High on Life, exact directions to where you need to go in Cyberpunk 2077, never having to bother with save games because most games have copious checkpoints... it's great!
Maybe I'm a klutz, but I remember in the late 90s and early 00s there were plenty of titles where a typical night of gaming would go like this: you have to make sure the intergalactic terrorists don't blow up the power plant, but after half an hour it's clear that you will need to level up to have a chance, another half an hour later you resort to google and figure out that you really shouldn't have skipped that side quest because then you'd have that invisibility upgrade, you finally make your way past the baddies but after a toilet break get confused about what direction you were going in and suddenly find yourself back where you started, you retrace your steps, go on, press the Avoid Reactor Meltdown button but because you've clicked a couple of pixels too far to the left, then a couple of pixels too far to the right, it doesn't do anything, so now you're thinking, maybe I didn't complete all the prereqs so let's wander around some more, but you're getting annoyed so you repeatedly fall off of some walkway into lava... ultimately you make it to the end boss and after the 17th try you realize that their right eye is their weak point, but only for a window of five seconds after it has stopped glowing red. Too bad you didn't stock up on sniper bullets and entered the last room without full health, might have to load an earlier save game to fix that.
I'm sure a lot of people are nostalgic for that special feeling when you've beat a difficult game, but there are a lot of ways in which games used to be difficult that were incidental, through lack of affordances, instead of essential to the gameplay.
Manufactured emotions and hand holding for 'an experience' instead of just fun.
I missed achievements and loading times! Some shader recompilation before the level load would have been tops :)
Edit: I was impatient. I got my "Focus, Sweeper." Life is good.
Edit 2: It's actually impossible to lose the game. This is art.
I'm sad that SpeedTree and Havoc weren't in the intro logos though.
I am also a big fan of the game and its variants and currently working on Rogue Sweeper, just another Minesweeper roguelike (beta name, finding an actual name is the hard part)
Still in early beta and iPhone only for now. If anyone wants to give it a try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/sjbNFZWH
Feedback always welcome.
I mean, it doesn't last very long without something else going on, but there is a reason.
Worked?
The game takes a very long time to load. This is funny, but not desirable in an actual game.
There is voiceover dialogue as you start. You can listen to it, but at some point you'll want to start playing the game.
There is an indicator telling you which square to clear next. I ignored this for several reasons:
- I want to know if you're compelled to follow it (you aren't);
- It's pointing to the wrong square;¹
- Following it would defeat the entire purpose of playing the game.
Dialogue continues as you play. But you can't listen to it because your mind is occupied. Following the indicator would solve that problem...
¹ There is a game you can find called Hexcells that is supposed to be an "improved" version of minesweeper. The "improvements" are two:
1. It's a hex grid, not a square grid.
2. In general, there is only one hex known to be clear at any given time. This means that the structure of the game is that you mindlessly reveal whichever tile you just gained information about rather than suffering under any obligation to think about what you can tell from the board.
I'm not sure why this was supposed to be an improvement; the only effect is to remove the entire puzzle aspect from a puzzle game. But hey, Steam reviews are "overwhelmingly positive". https://store.steampowered.com/app/265890/Hexcells/
In unrealistic fashion, you can in fact mash through the license logos once you load in. So thr game itself doesn't actually take long at all to boot up on a technical level; the delays were a design choice.
That is not remotely an accurate description of Hexcells. Either you didn't play it, or you didn't play it more than the early levels. In Hexcells, you do not just have info on the tiles, but also along rows of hexes (telling you how many are in that row, and sometimes if they are contiguous or separate), as well as some hexes which tell you how many tiles you need to flag in a radius around them. It is fairly common that you need to combine multiple pieces of information about the board state in order to deduce what the next move is, with some of the later puzzles being so complicated at points that you practically have to bust out pencil and paper to work through the logic.
And all of that, while interesting, is not the improvement of Hexcells over Minesweeper (nor are the hexagon cells). The improvement is that you never, ever have to guess blindly and have the game tell you if you were wrong. Every puzzle can be worked out through sheer logic, though some do require you to guess at a hypothesis and then do a long chain of logic to prove or disprove if that would be a valid move (kind of like sudoku puzzles often do). The expanded mechanics are interesting too, but just the fact that you don't ever have to guess blindly is a massive improvement.
Just as a specific example, having a long loading time can heighten the anticipation and thus the eventual enjoyment of a game.
Obviously not always and it's an extremely complicated subject. But the principle is real. Essentially all games boil down to an arbitrary amount of waiting/work in order to get a thing.
In effect, to juice up a game without adding substantial game design mechanics and thought.
A similar sort of overuse happened with blockbuster movies' special effects.
I was expecting it to open up on some WW2 style battlefield with smoke and explosions, but this was better.
[edit]
Oh, it says "I think there's a mine here" when you mark a location, but the yellow-diamond is "click here because there's no mines" it's not related to what is being said.
Apart from those films which do t have them.
Absolute Cinema
Thanks for sharing! It made my day.