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
it took me an hour to realize that i needed to double click to start the game. i tried switching browsers, using a vpn/proxy, turning off ublock... nothing helped...
This is minesweeper 33. I'n out sweeping mines and I ran across one that looks different than the others. I'll keep investigating while mine sweeping. I'm recording this 30 second clip onto an entire recording device with a 64gb SD card. I'll leave it on this rock for others to find. Don't worry, I have 11 other devices to record my short messages. Wait, the mine, it's glowing! I can't--
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.
Before anyone else spends additional minutes like I just did - there aren't multiple endings. Even though the above would have opened that opportunity.
That will be coming in the first DLC in a few months, delayed because it is being developed by a new team after the original development studio was bought by Activision, retasked to making a mobile solitaire game, then laid off.
And this is another example of why you shouldn't let LLM (especially older versions of Claude) to write all game texts. To me it's extremely annoying to read those.
I was angry at the wasted 30 seconds of opening licensed 3rd party software listings, but I stayed through to the end of the credits roll, laughing until I cried.
I think the opening logo sequence is too short. Also it's missing agreement to 2-3 EULAs that you have to scroll down all the way for the accept button to get enabled. And the epilepsy warning. And the disclaimer that it's all a work of fiction.
I always wondered about this one on PC games. What kind of person quits a game by hard powering off their PC or forcably terminating the game process with something like Task Manager? Because any reasonable way to quit a PC game can either be blocked by the game itself while it's saving (Alt+F4, which is an application shortcut, not a system shortcut), or delayed for long enough to save (graceful shutdowns and reboots).
You may underestimate how many people try to play big ass games on slow or resource short PCs. With old hard disks it wasn't uncommon for saving to stun lock the computer for surprisingly long periods of time.
If I'm playing on my steam deck, I kill games fairly often. It's the easiest way to exit. Open the menu, tap exit, stick it on the charger and off I go. Admittedly most of the games I play either don't auto save, are cloud-based, or are idle games (who cares?).
That was a great parody, but how much of those effects still worked even though you knew it was coming? The fade ins, blurring the outsides, the emotional voice talking to you... it definitely raised my interest more than just opening minesweeper!
I mean, it doesn't last very long without something else going on, but there is a reason.
> That was a great parody, but how much of those effects still worked even though you knew it was coming? The fade ins, blurring the outsides, the emotional voice talking to you...
Worked?
First, the game takes a very long time to load. This is funny, but not desirable in an actual game.
Next, 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;
- 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...
>First, the game takes a very long time to load. This is funny, but not desirable in an actual game.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The game takes a very long time to load. This is funny, but not desirable in an actual game.
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.
262 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 28.6 ms ] threadSidequest 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
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.
"X... button?"
"Focus, Sweeper! Sweeper? SWEEPEEEER!"
This is Art.
I mean, it doesn't last very long without something else going on, but there is a reason.
Worked?
First, the game takes a very long time to load. This is funny, but not desirable in an actual game.
Next, 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;
- 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...
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.