Minesweeper — The Biggest Bomb There Is
There are two types of video games. There are the games that give you a fighting chance, games that are set up so that everything is doable and that if you rise to the challenge and learn the game well, nothing is impossible for you. And then there are games like Minesweeper.
Alongside Demon’s Souls and the two Dark Souls games, Minesweeper is one of the most blatantly unfair games ever designed. On first glance, it’s like Bejeweled in that everything about the game is random and so it didn’t need to ship with levels like FreeCell did. But that’s the biggest problem with Minesweeper, as I will hopefully be able to explain to you.
The object of the game is to determine where on the grid a pre-determined number of mines are. But with the random nature of the board, there are inevitably arrangements that are impossible to solve, no matter what. Oh, they can still be won, but you have to be incredibly lucky to do so. It’s sort of like fighting a monster in an RPG, but instead of being allowed to just make the final blow, you have to flip a coin and see if you’re successful or not. If you are, then you’ve won the battle. If you’re not, the monster somehow slaughters you even though you have full HP and you have to fight another one instead.
Here, I’ll give you an example at the “Beginner” level.
Oh, come on. If that’s a beginner’s puzzle, then you’re not even trying to encourage people to keep playing, Minesweeper. “Oh, but Joseph,” you say. “I am only a casual game and Bejeweled is just as random as I am.” Yeah, but Bejeweled isn’t as unfair either. It’s possible to know, if you’re a good enough player, what your matches will do to the board and therefore you can set up future matches and prevent yourself from losing the game for quite a while. You can’t do that with Minesweeper. Aside from the first click, you have no control over the board and if you’re stuck with the above scenario, you might as well accept that you’re about to be screwed before you click and be pleasantly surprised if you do indeed win.
And about this being a casual game? Bullshit! There’s an Expert mode for the hardcore players who think that they can find 99 bombs on a bigger board. You can invest quite a bit of time trying to win one of these boards because the majority of the time, it will end up looking something like this:
Unlike the first screenshot, which I still won through sheer luck (the top block was a mine, by the way), I clicked wrong and blew up the second screenshot.
And that’s not all. You can compete against players around the world to see who can achieve the best time. Don’t believe me? The most hardcore of players can do an Expert puzzle in slightly more than half a minute. This is an actual world record, proving that there is international competition in Minesweeper. That a game this unfair is still competitive just makes me shake my head.
At least the game doesn’t look like it cost a billion dollars to make, so the programmers won’t be complaining that they’re broke like so many did the previous generation and so many more will during this one. The graphics are very simple and pleasing to look at, and can even be customized on recent editions to look like either a bomb field or – for the children – a flower garden. There’s no music at all, so it encourages players to create custom playlists on their favourite music program. So fire up WinAmp if you still have it and play such bands as Terrorist, Bomb The Music Industry! and Andrew Jackson Jihad as you search for the things that go boom. (Or play the Flower soundtrack as you hunt for flowers in the garden, you E-rated player, you.)
In all, I’ve found Minesweeper to be occasionally frustrating, yet I constantly come back to it. The game must ship with digital crack in it because not even Lunar: Dragon Song has made me want to play it again, and yet here I am still playing Minesweeper over a decade after I started. How does this happen? Take it from me: avoid this game at all costs or you too will become addicted to the digital version of getting your ass kicked by rhinos.
About The Author
Joseph
Panthera Editus | In the great frozen land in the north known as Canada, a little to the east of that other frozen land in the north known as Alaska, resides the gaming enthusiast whom most people know as Joseph. When he’s not gaming or writing about gaming, he likes to enjoy life’s little ironies. Twitter
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I typically pick an explosive posie on the first turn, so I quickly give up on this sort of herbalism in exchange for a tile-matching puzzle. Bejeweled isn’t half bad, though I’m a bigger fan of Tetris. I enjoy a game with a minor involvement of luck, like using Metronome on a Cait Sith in hopes of it dropping Stormshield, but unless Hell experiences a brief cold front, I can never come close to finishing a board on Minesweeper. Usually, I’ll find a spot where there are two possible locations for a bomb and, well, as I like to say, I couldn’t win a coin flip if you gave me two guesses.