Gaming tips: Minesweeper

Excitement.

Howdy folks. This is the third entry in Eric Keihl's ongoing cavalcade of laziness, foisting his perceived duties of posting multiple entries a week onto his compadres. Today's guest writer is Jon Marquis, a man who is totally unqualified to write about video games, but being a big fan of synergy, could not pass up this opportunity. He is currently toiling away as the Baltimore Music Reviews Examiner, and this is his chance to showcase his writing while including a link to his Examiner page, as well as hooking Eric Keihl into returning the guest article favor sometime soon. Also, since Keihl gave him his login information to post, Jon can snoop around his profile and see how many more or less hits per page Keihl is getting. Considering the titillating (pun immensely intended) subject matter of the last article, he sees it as his competitive duty to cover a mind-numbingly mundane topic.

As I said in that awkward third-person introduction, I have no right being here today. My gaming credentials are so sparse that I have actually participated in scientific video game studies as a non-gamer. There is, however, one game in which I can safely claim expertise: Minesweeper. Though the score has now been lost to a dead hard drive, my Expert Minesweeper record is 34 seconds, which according to this questionable website is better than the world record. Granted, it may well have been a computer glitch, but all the same, I am quite a demon at the game and I was most assuredly in the zone during that particular game.

It is quite obvious that when it comes to Minesweeper, I am a very proud man. I am not a selfish man, though, and just as Keihl last used the “Gaming Tips” feature to share his Team Fortress 2 wisdom with the world (one tip he forgot to include in that article was not to play that game with a microphone if you have a roommate and thin walls, as it is apt to wreck that certain roommate's precious sleep and sometimes people hold grudges), I shall offer up a wealth of advice for anyone interested in conquering the ultimate of time-wasters.

First off, pity poor Justin Long. I have been told that there is a way for Mac users to play Minesweeper, but I have never acquainted myself with such an abomination and therefore much of the subsequent advice may very well be moot for that version. Certainly if you lack the right-click option, you're totally screwed. Same with any computer that uses a touchpad. Touchpad Minesweeper is like heavy petting with oven mitts; it's awkward, pointless, and frustrating.

And more in Microsoft's favor, the Minesweeper Help page is actually quite helpful, giving a pretty good rundown of how the game works and offering a few hints. Of course, the first tip (“Try to mark all mines right away”) is something to drop as you get better acquainted with the game. If you play enough, you'll pretty instinctively know the obvious spots to avoid, so there's little need to mark them. Similarly, even though they're useful when learning the ropes, it's best to drop the whole “question marks” option right quick, as they just waste time once you get more confident.

Unfortunately, getting confident in Minesweeper is rather tricky. According to the new-fangled stats feature on the new-fangled (and inferior) Windows Vista version of Minesweeper, my win percentage on Expert is a measly 7%, having successfully completed only 384 games out of a total 5324. This is due to my current priority of speed over accuracy, but naturally, accuracy needs to be acquired first. I vividly remember the first time I completed a game in Expert mode, but I couldn't tell you my time, as the timer had stopped at the 999 second mark.

The best path toward toward is a rote memorization of common Minesweeper patterns. I'm too lazy to go through them all, so luckily other websites have done so for me. Getting a handle on these patterns is key to getting better times, since thankfully Minesweeper is more about immediate pattern recognition than any actual math. Actually (and this is the point where I realize this whole article is even more pointless than I originally thought), just learning the basic concepts from the Microsoft Help and getting a hang of those pattern are really all you need to know to get going, and from there it's just a hell of a lot of practice. Just keep sweeping and sweeping until it becomes second nature. As you get speedier, rational thought will give way to quick educated guesses. As my low win percentage shows, these guesses are often wrong, though I attribute many of these losses to an accidental click or a quick jerk of the mouse too soon. Try to avoid those.

Finally, if while playing Minesweeper, you experience some of the following symptoms: extreme pain beginning around the navel and moving down and to the right side of the abdomen, where it worsens when moving, taking deep breaths, coughing, sneezing, or being touched in that area; loss of appetite; nausea; vomiting; change in bowel movements, including diarrhea or inability to have a bowel movement or pass gas; low fever that begins after other symptoms; and frequent, difficult, bloody, or painful urination, you should probably stop playing Minesweeper (minimizing it freezes the clock) and go to the hospital, 'cause there's a good chance you have appendicitis. The appendix is sort of like a Minesweeper mine, as there's no real reason for why it's there, but if it runs the risk of bursting, it needs to be located as a problem and dealt with. All that said, playing Minesweeper will give you no lifesaving skills, just life-wasting.

Well kids, wasn't that dull and barely informative? Hopefully when Keihl ventures over to my neck of the woods to return the favor, he'll forget the mess I made here and instead offer up something interesting and unashamedly erotic. Though maybe I'll just consult Toby Horn for the latter.