August 12, 2008 -
If you love Minesweeper but are sick and tired of playing it for free on your computer, there's hope ahead. Developer TikGames is bringing a version of the classic puzzle game to Xbox Live Arcade in the form of Minesweeper Flags.
In a typical game of Minesweeper, you uncover squares in an attempt to clear the entire board without blowing up any hidden mines. But Minesweeper Flags turns that world upside-down, requiring you to locate mines rather than avoid them. The classic version, which has shipped with Windows since the early 1700s, is also included for the old-school crowd, but the focus here is on the new mode, which you can play either against AI opponents or real live humans locally or online.
For the uninitiated, here's how a typical Minesweeper game works. Each board is a collection of square tiles. Clicking on a tile reveals a mine (doh!), a blank square or a number. The number -- from 1 to 6 -- indicates the number of mines hidden under the surrounding tiles. By strategically revealing numbered tiles, and by marking squares you're sure must be mines, you can work your way across the entire board based on elimination for an easy win.
That's the gametype available in Minesweeper Flags' Classic mode and Campaign, which features maps of varying shapes and sizes placed on a flat surface in a 3D area. In Campaign, you begin in North America and work your way throughout the world until you reach Antarctica. Each region has a different look and most have a different animal hanging out alongside the game board, just to raise the stakes. After all, if you leave any mines unswept, then we can only assume that the llamas, leopards and penguins that roam the land will eventually wander over them and explode in a shower of viscera and fur. No, that doesn't really happen in the game, but do you want that image on your conscience?
But the flagship mode is Flags (see what I did there?), which simplifies the Minesweeper experience by requiring you to find flags instead of avoiding them. Designed to be played against another player (whether computer or human), Flags is played on a traditional-looking Minesweeper board instead of the animal strewn environmental maps of the Campaign mode. Up to four players can join up to clear the board of pesky mines, and the game supports all the usual Xbox Live perks -- Achievements, chat, and leaderboards. You can adjust the turn time limit (from 20 seconds up to 1 minute), the number of players, whether finding a flag gives you another move, and how long the game continues after a player finds the majority of the flags.
Minesweeper Flag is still in development, and it's scheduled for a fall release on Xbox Live Arcade. We'll keep you posted as the PC-to-console crossover gets nearer to launch.
Oh yeah that's right. Minesweeper is coming to Xbox Live and is supposedly going to cost money. Not only that but supposedly it'll be 800 MS points, the same as Castlevania. The developer must have thought of how to out-lame Yaris and then came up with the concept of charging for what comes standard in every PC for free. Brilliant!
Tag: Became a freaking mod and a complete douche, coincidentally, at the same time.
