ARC Co. games: Minesweeper

Hey! Wanna play Minesweeper?
A: Yes B: No

<B>

Hey! Wanna play Minesweeper?
A: Yes B: No

<B>

Hey! Wanna play Minesweeper?
A: Yes B: No

<B>

Hey! Wanna play Minesweeper?
A: Yes B: No

Sigh... <A>

Wow, Minesweeper, eh?

I guess in 1992, it seemed like a novelty, having gained fame by being packed in with Windows 3.1 just a year earlier. It is perhaps one of the first "casual" games ever, since it was primarily played (along with Solitaire) by bored office workers just to pass the time in those long stretches between lunch and 5pm. It wasn't bought by gamers, on game systems until Pack-in Video felt it necessary to release Minesweeper on the GameBoy, PCE, and other systems.

Minesweeper in itself is a very simple game without a lot of depth. It's fun, and a good challenge to the spatial centres of the brain, but whether the board is a small 2x2 or 100x100, the technique is the same and thus tedium sets in (slowly or quickly, depending on the person.) The larger the board, the more of a chore I feel it gets, the same way a jigsaw puzzle is to play, in a sense.

ARC, the developers, knew this and so tried to spice up the regular game with two variations of the basic premise. Let's take a look!

Play mode and Edit mode are basically the same thing: the bog-standard Minesweeper with different ways of choosing the board size and number of mines. There is no actual editing, like drawing a smiley face out of mines, no SRAM backup or anything. Quite disappointing, then. Go ahead and play your well-known Minesweeper to your heart's... content?

Cook's Quest is a fun diversion and an interesting twist on the standard game theme. You play a cook (a wordplay on the nautical captain?) armed with a frying pan (??) who has to dig his way through a cave from one end of the screen to the other. There are treasures to collect, keys that open doors, and a labyrinth to work through under a time limit. Said limit is represented by a boulder that rolls its way towards you at the top of the screen. You can also extend this time limit by picking up clock icons. The game itself uses the standard Minesweeper rules, though you can only walk on tiles around ground that you've dug out.

Now, this is the way to extend the life of a simple game, giving it a quest-like feel similar to Zelda or Bomberman Tournament (GBA). It becomes more fun and fleshed-out. However, they've done only a 1/4-assed job in making a real quest, since it's only 1 labyrinth, hitting a mine still gives you an instant game over, and there's no saving your progress -- you have to start over from the beginning anytime something unpleasant happens.

Jeez, this is beginning to feel like a review of some pirate Famicom Link to the Past remake, isn't it?

If the designers had added savepoints or checkpoints, provided more items, labyrinths to explore and perhaps some interstitial towns or castles with more things to do besides "minesweeping", then perhaps this game would have earned at least a modicum of respect and given it a reason for people to purchase it. Take a look at Power Sokoban on the SFC. It might give off a whiff of a late-era budget title, but it's at least an example of how to take a cobweb-ridden game mechanic, add multiple worlds, characters, items, enemies, and traps. It's fun to play and totally worth your while and money. Er... Power Sokoban, that is. Not Minesweeper.

The Great Voyage

Ah, ARC likes to believe that this variation is the meat of the Minesweeper disc. They've lavished attention on the graphics and story by spanning your minesweeping activities over 5 centuries, added passwords to save your progress, and provided maps, stages, and the dig-your-way-around gameplay of Cook's Adventure.

It's still dreadfully dull, though, and nothing can cover that up. Completing a level has a nice sense of achievement, but the ending screens you get as a reward --showing a ship floating on the ocean -- feel so sparse and lonely. I don't know about you, but they only reminded me of my solitude and made me question whether I was wasting my life playing not just this game, but all games. Wow. Now that's a powerful game if it can send one into an existential crisis.

Overall, this is a very lightweight disc. The graphics are really nothing special, the individual game variations feel like an afternoon of Flash programming, but at least the music is kinda groovy in a few tracks. Sad to say this is the least appealing of ARC's programming efforts.

Because I'm such a nice guy, here's a FULL Password Generation Table for The Great Voyage!

PASSWORD CHARACTER 1,3,5:								PASSWORD CHARACTER 2,4:
Mission	1	2	3	4	5	6	7		Any of:
Difficulty	16th Century								ZM
1		YES	TSD	JBS	CUS	PRZ	PZR		OU
2	EFA	SEL	UEC	AZT	ATN	BSJ	YSX		JB
3	GDF	ZLF	DEL	PZT	FKE	CEH	CSU		TG
4	FRL	AKT	JST	BXE	GSD	UCE	EAS		FP
5	OSH	TDF	ESA	RSA	HEC	DRG	UEO
6	CHE	HOK	DZR	RAS	OSE	SLK	FLK
7	DGR	FEK	XSY	SLR	LKN	OHE	GFS	Example: 18th c, Mission 7, Diff 3:
8	PGZ	GDS	ZFL	UKO	XST	SEK	KVA	ATZ + FP ---> AFTPZ
9	SRL	TDS	RFA	JYS	ZFV	PGR	CHS
10	ZAF	LNK	HCK	KLF	FKL	JTB	DGZ		Hey, look! I found an earlier version of the game's title screen tiles hidden in the game file. What pops right out at me is the "Microsoft" attribution.
	18th Century
1	RFC	XYT	XTY	ESC	EFC	UKC	SKR
2	YJS	ZLV	TPF	KLV	JSB	XSB	FEL
3	XBT	DRZ	UOK	UKE	KFA	RAF	ATZ
4	ANK	TSF	FRK	XYS	LTK	TFD	GPF
5	LNT	ECA	JYT	UCK	BJS	LZT	UEK
6	GSF	BSE	YXS	JBT	KAF	YXE	RCA
7	ANT	CES	PRG	EAF	YJE	EAC	PTR
8	HEK	OES	HAZ	FLE	KFV	PTZ	XTB
9	SKL	ZVL	JVE	GFD	OHS	LTZ	CFY
10	UOE	TSP	KTR	HCE	YEJ	HKE	BGR
	20th Century
1	LKT	RCS	DZT	AHS	BEX	GFP	SLE
2	XBS	DTZ	PZD	ZVA	HKO	TFP	HKC
3	BJE	GSP	ANZ	GDY	JSY	ECR	ZFA
4	LTN	CEU	BSX	RCF	KFL	FBJ	HEO
5	SRK	LZN	DRT	SKE	YEX	AZN	KVL
6	ECS	AKN	CSE	OEH	BES	BXS	TFS
7	FKR	ATK	HOE	RAC	OSU	PZG	XTS
8	GPS	DZG	JTS	RSC	LNZ	BEJ	ZVF
9	TPS	KVF	YSE	OUE	OEU	CSH	OUS
10	PRT	CUE	YSJ	DTR	FLR	KAV	JTY