Pretty close but they forgot the part where I have to install anti cheat, update my drivers and reboot, create an account and link my email, check my email for a code, accept ToS, compile shaders, and wait for more patches to install before playing.
No not really. Most of it is handled for you. You don't install anticheat because the console already has DRM. You don't update your drivers because driver updates are bundled with OS updates (and you can't connect to the store without being on the latest update anyway). You don't compile shaders because they are pre-compiled on console.
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.
Amazing. Sat there for about five minutes listening to the dialogue, wasn't until I started hearing repeats that I realized it was actually interactive and not just an unnecessarily long opening cutscene.
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).
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.
Fun fact, on Windows 95, minesweeper had a cheat code; xyzzy "shift" "enter" and it would change the color of the top-left pixel of the screen depending on whether or not the mouse was hovering over a bomb. It didn't work on later versions though.
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.
I really enjoy this trope. The "Zelda Ocarina of Time if it were a modern game" series has the MGS style discussion, and the whole series is incredible.
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.
I fucking loved that game. That and the Dr. Brain games define my childhood. Oh and gizmos and gadgets. And Commander Keen. And Descent. And Hillsfar. And Deathtrack.
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.
The market for video games is now on the close order of 1000 times larger than it was when Myst was released. It now includes the General Public, and all that entails.
Also there are a lot more high-quality games available now, for a lot less money. In the '80s and '90s you might spend $50-100 on a bad game and you'd play it anyways because you couldn't return it. Even if you could, your local game store only stocked so many things.
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.
Maybe this is my nostalgia speaking, but it felt better that way. When there was so much less software every new application was a journey. The mystery of going to the local computer store and choosing a floppy disk in a plastic baggie off of that cork board. Or sending a mail order to some PO box in Texas somewhere, and then you get mailed back a floppy disk. Now you have so many options. The option that is often chosen is don't play anything. I probably am very biased on this.
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.
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.
Though there definitely is a lot of slop out there (even before that term gained a new meaning) I think it's hard to argue that there are so many more high quality games now than there ever were before just because it's so much easier to develop and distribute them.
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".
I don't remember which game it was, but I'm pretty sure it was a ubisoft game, maybe AC3, where it felt so much like a tutorial that I spent the entire game wondering when I'd get out of the tutorial and onto the real game.
It ruined the game for me, because I never felt like I was let free to actually play the game.
Video games make more money than all of Hollywood combined.
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.
Before anyone else spends additional minutes like I just did - there aren't multiple endings. Even though the above would have opened that opportunity.
I have not seen any comment about the idea that you are being handholded through whole game without even needing to think about what to do next.
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 tried it, and clicked in the corner as the first move instead of the hand-holding location. Revealed half the board, as that usually does, and also revealed that the simulation of a AAA game was imperfect. Because what AAA game is going to let you actually start playing the game right off the bat, without even so much as a single click on a "Skip the Tutorial" button?
(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.)
Not exactly what you're describing, but Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) had a training course at the start. The game suggested a difficulty level based on how fast you completed it.
They even used yellow markers, explicitly parodying the yellow paint they've been putting in AAAA games to show players where to go next or what crate to break.
Exactly. “Yellow spray paint” has become a derogatory term in the industry to talk about these patronizingly obvious visual cues devs add to 3D games these days to let them know where to go.
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.
There is a bunch of AAA parody: 17 loading screen logos, epic music without anything happening, deep dialogues over nothing, gameplay is as imperative as it gets, unskippable dialogues.
I did let the credits scene play out completely, because it completely parodies the large staff count, with large numbers of them being in positions like directors and producers. It's such a good parody.
I fondly remember getting so stuck in Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango not just for days but even giving up for weeks before coming back with fresh motivation! This is the sort of challenge that’s actually rewarding when you manage to solve it (unlike being held by the hand the entire game).
> 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'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.
Turn off tutorial mode in the original Civilization. Play it. Every person I considered really smart in the early to mid nineties had a Civ addiction at some point. Because who doesn’t want to try to be God?
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.
Ah civ 1. Been chasing that high ever since. I talked my parents into buying a 486sx “for school” but I made sure it met the min reqs for civ. I put that packard bell through so much.
Check out UFO 50. Piles of amazing games, mostly just the right length (no need for filler content in any one game when you're making 50 of them!), and almost entirely tutorial free.
Unreal Engine and the Epic Games Store have nothing to do with each other really.
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 ...
Don't forget the unskippable launcher without controller support.
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.
36 goddamn seconds, mere moments are waking and, for what?! stabbed in the back again. i knew she wasn't good for it, why didn't i trust my instincts. all those people, so many goddamn people, and now this?! i ain't sweeping no more, i'm out.
Does anyone know if the voices are AI-generated? I was a little surprised; I don't think I would have questioned it if I heard them in a real game or video but since this seems to basically be a joke, I'm doubtful real voice actors were used.
Can you direct me to such a frontier? Bonus points if it is cheap.
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.
I learned it from other classmates in like my last year of high school. Then i mineswept a huge one with a high density of mines. What a waste of time. It was good for a younger kidnto make their mjnds sharper
As someone old enough to experience it as a kid: We tried to figure out what the heck this weird game was about until giving up and moving on with life.
This is exactly what I thought the Web was going to be like. Imagine the renaissance era of Classic Web if people could realize their clever ideas like this so easily.
The web is like this right now! You gotta go through noise and mess of it all! There's so many crazy people making weird stuff and sharing it all the time! You gotta find it!!!
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.
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.
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
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--
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 seemed so pointless and uninteresting to me. It's obviously a blindspot for me, since it's so heavily upvoted and liked by many. But for me, mindlessly clicking the prompted location, after sitting through some pointless into logos, leading to absolutely no payoff at all, just ending credits, was distasteful. Can someone who enjoyed this experience articulate why, so that I can reflect on my own personal failing in this regard?
The beauty of Hackernews, no way to determine whether it's a clueless boomer from old-tech days or a high IQ individual layering the joke even further.
There are thousands of great games which are not hand holding. Many studios are putting out amazing work that does not deserve to be lumped together with modern trash.
I am mostly been lurking here but since we are talking about Minesweeper, a good opportunity to break the silence :)
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)
Felix Varga and Johanna Kowalski (Online Services Engineers) must have done a really good job - with all the traffic from the HN front page login servers didn't go down and queue was almost instant.
That was a perfect execution. I almost saw a Kojima Game by Hideo Kojima title. The only thing missing was the dialogue at the end of the credits, where Xero says that "Afghanistan is where the answer lives."
Heck yeah, it was great. But OMG the captions over the bottom of the play area almost drove me nuts! Still, it's quite a piece of art, even if I don't really understand it (typical).
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?
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 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.
>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.
Is it always wrong when it says "I think there's a mine here"? It seemed to to me on my playthough...
[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.
Nice, ui doesn’t support “chording” ie click a number with all its mines flagged and all adjacent squares are clicked. It make clearing the board much faster.
You need to add achievements/trophies! Definitely need to achieve a trophy for clicking on the very first square, finding the first mine, your first flag, etc.
I'm curious which TTS model was used for the "Nora" voice. I kept noticing vocal artifacts in her speech disfluencies. Which bothers me more than it probably should...
It's minesweeper, a decidedly non-AAA game, but mixed in with many tropes of AAA games: corny/unnecessary allusions to character histories, verbose tutorials, "cold open" with eyelids fluttering open, some random NPC offering a way to grind for currency. That kind of thing.
Pretty close but they forgot the part where I have to install anti cheat, update my drivers and reboot, create an account and link my email, check my email for a code, accept ToS, compile shaders, and wait for more patches to install before playing.
Also the part where every single in-game menu looks as if it was created by a different team.
Those are mostly PC-exclusive features.
Everything in that list except "install drivers" is also present in consoles.
No not really. Most of it is handled for you. You don't install anticheat because the console already has DRM. You don't update your drivers because driver updates are bundled with OS updates (and you can't connect to the store without being on the latest update anyway). You don't compile shaders because they are pre-compiled on console.
And you're just hitting the surface.
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.
Amazing. Sat there for about five minutes listening to the dialogue, wasn't until I started hearing repeats that I realized it was actually interactive and not just an unnecessarily long opening cutscene.
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...
Lemme use this opportunity to link Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
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.
I was about to reply with this. Excellent time waster.
Fun fact, on Windows 95, minesweeper had a cheat code; xyzzy "shift" "enter" and it would change the color of the top-left pixel of the screen depending on whether or not the mouse was hovering over a bomb. It didn't work on later versions though.
So good.
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.
I really enjoy this trope. The "Zelda Ocarina of Time if it were a modern game" series has the MGS style discussion, and the whole series is incredible.
Here is the forest temple video which is a short sample of what to expect: https://youtu.be/KC656o7_zVk
The game 'UnMetal' takes this trope as far as it can be taken. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/
It's probably a bit too far, but nevertheless enjoyable for the comedic effect.
Co-op UnEpic was real fun.
Jesus Christ. I hate it. So so much.
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.
Did you like Myst? That was the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
Title screen video gives a vague story. Game starts. No dialog. No text. Just ... clicking and discovering the rest of the story.
I played Myst a bit, but my favorite in the genre was Sentinel: Descendants in Time. I used to carry a notebook to follow the puzzles, it was amazing.
"myst ... game starts"
well, now you're just making things up
I fucking loved that game. That and the Dr. Brain games define my childhood. Oh and gizmos and gadgets. And Commander Keen. And Descent. And Hillsfar. And Deathtrack.
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.
The market for video games is now on the close order of 1000 times larger than it was when Myst was released. It now includes the General Public, and all that entails.
Also there are a lot more high-quality games available now, for a lot less money. In the '80s and '90s you might spend $50-100 on a bad game and you'd play it anyways because you couldn't return it. Even if you could, your local game store only stocked so many things.
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.
Maybe this is my nostalgia speaking, but it felt better that way. When there was so much less software every new application was a journey. The mystery of going to the local computer store and choosing a floppy disk in a plastic baggie off of that cork board. Or sending a mail order to some PO box in Texas somewhere, and then you get mailed back a floppy disk. Now you have so many options. The option that is often chosen is don't play anything. I probably am very biased on this.
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.
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.
High-definition, sure.
High quality? Hmmmm.
Though there definitely is a lot of slop out there (even before that term gained a new meaning) I think it's hard to argue that there are so many more high quality games now than there ever were before just because it's so much easier to develop and distribute them.
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".
I don't remember which game it was, but I'm pretty sure it was a ubisoft game, maybe AC3, where it felt so much like a tutorial that I spent the entire game wondering when I'd get out of the tutorial and onto the real game.
It ruined the game for me, because I never felt like I was let free to actually play the game.
Check out UFO 50... It's got an insane number of amazing games, and is almost entirely tutorial-free.
Video games make more money than all of Hollywood combined.
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.
"Sweeper, press the X button to mark a mine."
"X... button?"
"Focus, Sweeper! Sweeper? SWEEPEEEER!"
I liked the triple-a minesweeper better than the windows original. First time i won the game.
No matter how many bombs you (deliberately) set off, you will win. :)
Before anyone else spends additional minutes like I just did - there aren't multiple endings. Even though the above would have opened that opportunity.
Hhhhhrnnng, Colonel, what's a Mine-D doing here?
“Why are we still here? Just to suffer?”
To pass me the butter
I have not seen any comment about the idea that you are being handholded through whole game without even needing to think about what to do next.
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 tried it, and clicked in the corner as the first move instead of the hand-holding location. Revealed half the board, as that usually does, and also revealed that the simulation of a AAA game was imperfect. Because what AAA game is going to let you actually start playing the game right off the bat, without even so much as a single click on a "Skip the Tutorial" button?
(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.)
Not exactly what you're describing, but Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) had a training course at the start. The game suggested a difficulty level based on how fast you completed it.
They even used yellow markers, explicitly parodying the yellow paint they've been putting in AAAA games to show players where to go next or what crate to break.
Exactly. “Yellow spray paint” has become a derogatory term in the industry to talk about these patronizingly obvious visual cues devs add to 3D games these days to let them know where to go.
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.
There is a bunch of AAA parody: 17 loading screen logos, epic music without anything happening, deep dialogues over nothing, gameplay is as imperative as it gets, unskippable dialogues.
I did let the credits scene play out completely, because it completely parodies the large staff count, with large numbers of them being in positions like directors and producers. It's such a good parody.
I’ve been playing Valheim for 2 years and I’m still finding things you can do that i didn’t know about.
I fondly remember getting so stuck in Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango not just for days but even giving up for weeks before coming back with fresh motivation! This is the sort of challenge that’s actually rewarding when you manage to solve it (unlike being held by the hand the entire game).
> 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'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.
Rimworld, of course. You'll keep discovering creative new ways for your colony to die for years.
Turn off tutorial mode in the original Civilization. Play it. Every person I considered really smart in the early to mid nineties had a Civ addiction at some point. Because who doesn’t want to try to be God?
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.
Ah civ 1. Been chasing that high ever since. I talked my parents into buying a 486sx “for school” but I made sure it met the min reqs for civ. I put that packard bell through so much.
486sx was for Doom. Civ1 could run on 286 if I remember correctly. With CGA.
Check out UFO 50. Piles of amazing games, mostly just the right length (no need for filler content in any one game when you're making 50 of them!), and almost entirely tutorial free.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a solid add to that list
My only criticism was the lack of shader compilation. I miss the time where I can go and make a sandwich without fear of missing out.
Bravo overall, nailed many tropes of modern gaming.
also missing options menu that has graphics settings with low, medium, high and ultra high.
Nice but the logos are skippable, which is not realistic.
Also, since it's an Unreal game, it's missing long load times, camera jitter, frame spikes, and dynamic resolution constantly kicking in.
It's also missing overly shiny textures and the horrible delayed input on Unreal games...
What is that effect called where text "glitches" with like chromatic abberation around the edges... SGRRK
i imagine this is usually due to bad anti aliasing mixed with screen space occlusion that messes with edges
but muh Steam's 30% cut, or something
Unreal Engine and the Epic Games Store have nothing to do with each other really.
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 ...
It's a bit hit-or-miss whether logos are skippable. Some games let you, some don't.
It's often a cover to mask loading times anyway.
I wished it was just all into logos and no actual game. That's the real AAA experience.
Don't forget the unskippable launcher without controller support.
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.
I love being forced to log in to two separate services play a single player game, genius!
36 goddamn seconds, mere moments are waking and, for what?! stabbed in the back again. i knew she wasn't good for it, why didn't i trust my instincts. all those people, so many goddamn people, and now this?! i ain't sweeping no more, i'm out.
Love this one with AAA Mario https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMh_APo2Xss
There is also the classic "Minesweeper - The Movie"[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs
"That clock is gonna keep ticking until it reaches 9-9-9!"
"What happens then?"
"Nothing. You just suck."
AAA Mario (1m41s video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMh_APo2Xss
Focus M.
Does anyone know if the voices are AI-generated? I was a little surprised; I don't think I would have questioned it if I heard them in a real game or video but since this seems to basically be a joke, I'm doubtful real voice actors were used.
The frontier of voice synth has reached roughly human parity. It’s also very inexpensive.
I’d be shocked if we don’t have mainstream games with AI voices soon.
Can you direct me to such a frontier? Bonus points if it is cheap.
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.
Artificial Analysis is usually a good resource to find current frontier AI models.
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.
they definitely sound ai generated yeah
The lady sounded like the voice of Celeste from Arc Raiders
100%
How did people in the 90s even manage to play Minesweeper without having a yellow marker to guide you?
I learned it from other classmates in like my last year of high school. Then i mineswept a huge one with a high density of mines. What a waste of time. It was good for a younger kidnto make their mjnds sharper
As someone old enough to experience it as a kid: We tried to figure out what the heck this weird game was about until giving up and moving on with life.
The "vi" game was really weird though.
No idea. But I had more fun _avoiding_ that yellow dot.
This is exactly what I thought the Web was going to be like. Imagine the renaissance era of Classic Web if people could realize their clever ideas like this so easily.
The web is like this right now! You gotta go through noise and mess of it all! There's so many crazy people making weird stuff and sharing it all the time! You gotta find it!!!
What's lacking is human-curated directories of such things, webrings, and pages listing site authors' personal favorites.
Largely replaced by social media, I suppose, including of course HN.
RIP dmoz.org
Exactly what you want, organized and broad. And also dead.
And moderated by spammers.
isn't the internet itself the OG social media
I just don’t find it often enough!
theres an FPS version of minesweeper out there
But I didn't need to install a publisher specific launcher to run it.
And then be forced to download a 42GiB update.
And accept telemetry and marketing!
And I don't think my accomplishments are being recorded!
And the anticheat that randomly bans innocent users
And it doesn’t add to my GamerScore.
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.
This is Art.
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.
Failed certification because it didn’t warn you not to turn off when the save icon is spinning.
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.
I think that the warning is required on consoles and taking it out of the PC port would be extra work, so it stays...
Don't forget the "this game may trigger epilepsy" warning that every game has now.
Also missing the redirect to your browser to connect to Epic Games and create a SweeperPro account with 2FA
I only wish there were more than happened if you died. Absolutely the best thing ever. Thank you for this experience.
I lol’d when they said “there’s no time to waste”… after making me watch five splash screens.
Thank you for making this. Biting commentary on modern video games.
Now I need to go to late.sh for the terminal version ;-)
The author of the game posted on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/mikelacher.bsky.social/post/3mxepyw...
So good. Looking forward to level 2 so we can find out what happened in Singapore.
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.
This is just stellar. My favorite HN submission this year. Excellent.
I was absolutely hoping to see production babies in the credits. Can’t win ‘em all.
Given how many people with the same surnames worked on this game, I was surprised, too.
No pets credited either.
they only do that in good games
I was hoping for the thing where you play through like half of the game and only then it shows you the title against a dramatic vista.
Missing:
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
There should be additional audio logs you can find under some squares that provide snippits of backstory.
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--
Sorry, did you mean Achievement for Starting the Game for the First Time?
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...
"Only 7.89% of gamers unlocked this".
Those will be in the $50 DLC
so, in case if you like minesweeper and doom ... https://dreadsweeper.franzai.com/
This was incredibly enjoyable thanks for sharing.
This seemed so pointless and uninteresting to me. It's obviously a blindspot for me, since it's so heavily upvoted and liked by many. But for me, mindlessly clicking the prompted location, after sitting through some pointless into logos, leading to absolutely no payoff at all, just ending credits, was distasteful. Can someone who enjoyed this experience articulate why, so that I can reflect on my own personal failing in this regard?
That’s the joke. This is parodying patterns found in many high-budget (AAA) video games.
Also, if you hold off on sweeping all the mines, you’ll hear more dialogue over time that parodies other aspects of these games.
if the parent poster is not familiar with the state of AAA games from the past decade, then this whole parody would look like nonsense.
I cant determine whether this comment is metairony or not..?
The beauty of Hackernews, no way to determine whether it's a clueless boomer from old-tech days or a high IQ individual layering the joke even further.
Where is expert mode? Please introduce this! Or did I somehow miss it?
For a monent I thought it's a parable of trying to focus on actual work in an AI-shoved-down-your-throat corporate setting.
Needs:
- Checkpoints after each mine
- DLC for rounded corners
The DLC is a hat for John Sweeper.
It really does need a store with skins, several kinds of currencies, and loot boxes!
needs taa smearing and shader compilation hitches too
This is too good. And the main reason why I don't play games today!
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 :)
There are thousands of great games which are not hand holding. Many studios are putting out amazing work that does not deserve to be lumped together with modern trash.
Yeah and none of them are 'AAA'
I like the part where it doesn't even matter if you hit a mine, you are on this train ride regardless of what you do.
10/10 story. I look forward to the forthcoming motion picture adaptation from Skydance directed by Michael Bay.
After Singapore, there just wasn't any choice.
I have bigger fish to fry, Jack, get those mines defused
Please expand this into a full open-world minesweeping game
I am mostly been lurking here but since we are talking about Minesweeper, a good opportunity to break the silence :)
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.
Not only is this completely hilarious, it's also arguably a better version of minesweeper. Completely awesome project. I love it.
I'm sad that SpeedTree and Havoc weren't in the intro logos though.
Felix Varga and Johanna Kowalski (Online Services Engineers) must have done a really good job - with all the traffic from the HN front page login servers didn't go down and queue was almost instant.
All it's missing is a "Focus, S!"
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.
That was a perfect execution. I almost saw a Kojima Game by Hideo Kojima title. The only thing missing was the dialogue at the end of the credits, where Xero says that "Afghanistan is where the answer lives."
Do "AAA" games these days really have that much talking by default? Painful.
The constant overlapping dialogue as you kept on clicking wasn't an exaggeration.
I love the parody. Is this a treatise on modern game development? I hope so.
WHAT HAPPENED IN SINGAPORE?!
No lootboxes?
There aren't even any skins I can buy with my mom's credit card.
It's also missing a tutorial.
The names at the end credits cracked me up. Literally made my day.
And which half of the staff gets fired day after release?
the non-stopping narration makes it so hard to actually sweep the mines....
Don: Sounds like you're getting rusty. The Sweeper I knew in Singapore would never have choked like this from just a little background noise.
Focus, M.
i could block that out. the subtitles covering the area were more annoying.
Heck yeah, it was great. But OMG the captions over the bottom of the play area almost drove me nuts! Still, it's quite a piece of art, even if I don't really understand it (typical).
Look! I swept all the mines! https://imgur.com/a/7OJxBy9
Great, it would be super cool to remix it with https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper
It is missing a huge cut to a countdown timer for added suspense, a film isn’t a film without a cut to the countdown timer driving the story.
Apart from those films which do t have them.
I'd buy it just to learn what happened in Singapore.
Fun! The credits were probably the highlight for me.
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.
These effects are the logical conclusion to the ideas presented in this video: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016487/juice-it-or-lose
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.
> 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?
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 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.
>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.
Ok, but where are the microtransactions and subscribtions?
AAA Pacman is also a good one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVY_oJlv_Eo
Great parody - very "Focus, M"-esque. Often, it feels that we've lost sight of "If it's not fun, why bother".
I need to sweep these mines!
That's hilarious. Spot on.
I missed "compiling shaders"
Is it always wrong when it says "I think there's a mine here"? It seemed to to me on my playthough...
[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.
What no 30 minute shaders compiling sequence?
Nice, ui doesn’t support “chording” ie click a number with all its mines flagged and all adjacent squares are clicked. It make clearing the board much faster.
I gave up before I read "Minesweeper" for the first time.
The subtitles covering the board while the narrator keeps telling me to focus is painfully accurate. The credits were the best part.
I absolutely love the fact that it's impossible to lose. You can click every mine and still not lose.
icymi, we can also do this with Mario https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMh_APo2Xss
You need to add achievements/trophies! Definitely need to achieve a trophy for clicking on the very first square, finding the first mine, your first flag, etc.
Wow the ending credits music was actually pretty awesome
Second that. Would like to hear more about how it came about. Probably AI generated? Great nonetheless.
I'm going to go ahead and assume everything we see and hear in a joke project like this is AI generated.
Pac-Man as a Modern AAA Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaoUVVD-hUc
I should follow those pac-dots...
Performance is too good for the UE game.
Sweep (2026)
"Whose mines are these?" "Huh, just a flag."
Absolute Cinema
This is straight up brilliant.
Needs an 'always online' requirement
Should have done some shader compilation
Was expecting Hideo Kojima in the credits.
This is hilarious
Ok but like... Kojima vibes. 10/10 best trippppllleee AAYYyyyyy game to come out this year lol
Funniest is, you can hit every single mine with no drawbacks.
I feel like there's some reference to the recent Wolverine game and it's unfailable driving sequences in that ...
Where do I enter my credit card info for the Season Pass and the special operator skin?
I need to sweep these mines.
hahaha! That's pretty funny. That credit tho. Just how many engineers you need to make a minesweeper game?
Thanks for sharing! It made my day.
This made me laugh. The credits broke me haha
the whole point of mine sweeper is to be fast. Extra things is slowing it down. It is too complicated for a simple game.
It's a parody, not a serious attempt to make a mine sweeping game.
No micro transactions?
We need a day-1 patch to align the mines to the center of their tile.
Not even a dlc and cosmetics?
Despite all the stuff it's parodying, this is still a lot better than Bomberman: Act Zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomberman%3A_Act_Zero
Where do we get the soundtrack and merch?
Art
There might be a mine here
What the hell happened in Singapore?
Needs a 128GB RAM, 100GB free disk space requirement.
I'm curious which TTS model was used for the "Nora" voice. I kept noticing vocal artifacts in her speech disfluencies. Which bothers me more than it probably should...
Masterpiece
Can I get an FPS overlay for this?
This is amazing.
Needs the epilepsy warning and Activision account login, plus TOS consent screen, network login failure warning, new DLC series content updates
Fancy playing the standard edition when the deluxe edition has a limited edition enhanced selection icon, a music cd and a small plastic mine.
The ending needed to force you to click on a mine so you die in the cutscene lmao.
Is there a help card? Or, how do you turn off the CC captions? They obscure the bottom of the play field on my Mactop.
Intro is too long
this is aweful, thanks
This was great, but honestly, I would have enjoyed a non-joke take on this. Like, but with a cinematic story around it.
I need to sweep these mines!
Incredible
First time I've laughed out loud at one of these sorts of things in a while...
I was expecting it to open up on some WW2 style battlefield with smoke and explosions, but this was better.
Strong metal gear solid vibes… i love that
Could someone recommend a well-organized book on this kind of direction? I'm curious how a small game like this pulls off this kind of direction.
Mine Sweeper: Tom Clancy's Sweep Job
I laughed way way way too hard
Brilliant. You nailed it! Still laughing.
Perfection.
Finally, a Minesweeper with a side quest.
I thought for sure a popup was going to appear asking me to log in with Games For Windows Live!
Needs Debra Wilson
That was awesome
Brilliant! You nailed it.
The part where the subtitles hide the mines is the best for me. Also talk with Ubisoft - they make AAAA games.
Damn I didn't even have to Press Start to begin
This is fun.
omg this is brilliant i was IMMEDIATELY tilting my face off
"Oof! A mine!"
now add a kernel level rootkit and a monthly subscription which guarantees a set amount of loot-boxes a month.
What is the point of this?
lol perfect execution. I cracked up with the smiley face lip sync.
Made me lol, thanks :D
Lmao
I guess there's a joke here somewhere? It's minesweeper but annoying?
It's minesweeper, a decidedly non-AAA game, but mixed in with many tropes of AAA games: corny/unnecessary allusions to character histories, verbose tutorials, "cold open" with eyelids fluttering open, some random NPC offering a way to grind for currency. That kind of thing.
Thanks. I guess you have to be a video game player to fully appreciate!