Ok, "completing" minesweeper aside.

I think this is interesting, maybe because there's like a powerful resurgence going on around me cuz of one person who decided minesweeper was fun again, but also because I was toying around with this vs. a bunch of other minesweeper knock-offs, and kept circling back to this one.

And why? Because of rng. Which is weird, because I can't think of anything more frustrating and annoying about minesweeper then you running into the dreaded 3-1 with two last clickable spaces left, or just the pretense that because you rolled the dice wrong you were fucked from the start, kiddo. But when I played versions that used algorithms to remove that element, where it just became a game of statistical probability using the same techniques ad nauseum, rather than some measures in my head to try to reduce the risk through intuition, it became... boring. A solved game isn't always bad, but it's not something I come back to, and I don't think most people do.

That's the wild part, this game is ancient and it swallows up my freetime hours lately with nothing but basic probability management and very simple to learn techniques. All baked into a very intentionally irritating gameplay component. There are people who have spent their lives optimizing that component, creating strategies to fuck with the board, bending the numbers under their knee until they unlocked it like a fucked up puzzle and going YES I GOT IT.

Fucking wild. Legendary game, probably not something I'll recommend lol. This is just a fun retrospective.

Reviewed on Nov 27, 2020


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This is barely related to my review here, But I was channeling a lot of late night anger into experimenting with the minesweeper speedrun side (one cuz it was also talked around me, and two cuz I felt like I didn't delve too deep). Managed to get my time down from 249ish to a 180 after a few tries. Cathartic, still don't think the game is good though! Just needed a stress dummy.