The Flipside of Gaming
I’ve saved this one up for a while. For those of you who remember when Minesweeper was distributed — for free?? — with every copy of Microsoft Windows. What are the odds that unlikely layouts, like 8s, or neighboring 7s, are possible in that game? Alternatively, is it possible to get a game that can be completed in one move? Find out here (16 minutes):
There’s a game ebook bundle going on at StoryBundle, with a collection of posts from Set Side B on it! But more than that, it has books on Mortal Kombat by David Craddock, books on beat-em-ups and horror games from Hardcore Gaming 101, on early arcade history from Andrea Contato, and books from Boss Fight Games on Parappa the Rapper, Goldeneye 007 and Minesweeper! It’s got just five days remaining.
You can get all 10 books for $25! It’s gone up lately but it’s still really worth it! All of the books have no DRM and can be read in most any reader, including Amazon devices! They can read EPUBs now! At last finally surprisingly at this late date!
StoryBundle is a wonder, they always present so much interesting stuff. I’m rather surprised they keep asking me back, so I try to make my own weird little contributions to it worth your while.
Gaming Feast StoryBundle (ends December 14th)
It’s not a command to delete temp files as root on a Unix-styled system! It’s a fun and free little game over at itch.io!
The board on the left is a Sudoku-like game; the board on the right is Minesweeper. The two boards match: the numbers on the Sudoku board are the number of mines in the matching area of the Minesweeper game. You use each to help you solve the other!
It’s not perfect, mind you. There’s currently no way to mark a square that definitely has a mine in it, just the question marks you see in the right-hand board above. There are still cases, familiar to players of standard Minesweeper, where you end up having to guess. And don’t click the “change size” button if you care about the current game: it doesn’t make the boards larger, it starts a new game with bigger Minesweeper and Sudoku boards!
Still though, I have to give creator Rianna Suen props for a cool idea! I found this through the “map obelisk” area during Roguelike Celebration, which is a pretty cool place to find things beloved of clever people!
Sudo Sweep (itch.io, free, playable by web)
I got a treat for you people today, a genuine treasure of the internet, a collection of forty computer-generated puzzles of wide-ranging types, from Sudoku (called “Solo” because of trademarks) to Minesweeper. And they’re not only all open source and free, they’re free for many platforms. Not all the puzzles are yet available for all platforms, but it’s continually being worked on, with new puzzles added from time to time. It has been for nineteen years; when it got started it only had five puzzle types. It’s one of the best things out there, and I’m amazed it’s not better known generally.
I can’t overstate what a wonder this collection is. All the puzzles are their own executable, if you don’t just play them on the web anyway. Each one of these puzzles offers many hours of happy puzzling. My own favorites are Loopy, Slant, Bridges, Dominosa, Galaxies, Net and Untangle. Most of the puzzles are of a type that should be familiar to fans of the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli, but they’re all randomly generated, and playable on multiple difficulty levels.
If the name Simon Tatham sounds familiar, he’s the guy who also created and maintains the popular networking tool PuTTY.
Here’s the links, all of these are free:
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection main site, which has implementations for Java, Javascript and Windows
Here’s some other HTML implementations
For iOS on the Apple App Store
In the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories (and it should be available in your own distribution’s repository, too)
And here it is for Windows again, but distributed through Chocolatey