Tetris wasn't hard enough on its own
February 15, 2012 9:58 PM   Subscribe

Tetris plus Minesweeper = Tetrisweeper. A moves left, D moves right, W and E rotate, S drops. Click to uncover, shift-click to flag. (SLFlash)
posted by spitefulcrow (39 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Hell. Fucking. Yes!
posted by phaedon at 10:09 PM on February 15, 2012


Just wait till you see my mash-up of Half Life 2 and Words With Friends.
posted by bicyclefish at 10:17 PM on February 15, 2012 [3 favorites]


Fucking brilliant! I love it.
posted by studioaudience at 10:19 PM on February 15, 2012


Oh dear lord. I'm kissing good bye to any sort of productivity for the next few days.
posted by astapasta24 at 10:34 PM on February 15, 2012


o god o god it's 1994 all over again dear please god the timesink the timesink it's happening all over again

I'm going to bed. Thanks for this!
posted by not_on_display at 10:36 PM on February 15, 2012


Is it just me, or does this not work properly in Chrome? I tried it in IE and it works fine. The game play is pretty terrible, though. I thought this would be really awesome, but it's actually pretty terrible.
posted by asnider at 10:45 PM on February 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Seconding asnider.
Some things might sound like a good idea, but most are not.
This is one of the latter.
posted by GoingToShopping at 10:51 PM on February 15, 2012


Apparently you have to clear out all the cells minesweeper-style before the rows you've completed tetris-wise will remove from the chamber? And then it starts throwing lines in from below and that's when I said "this is some bullshit" and closed the tab.
posted by FatherDagon at 10:51 PM on February 15, 2012


I felt no inclination at all to spend time on this. But then, I've never really enjoyed playing Minesweeper.

But I did recently lose a whole day to Sugar, Sugar.
posted by flabdablet at 11:00 PM on February 15, 2012 [6 favorites]


You must flag all the mines on any give row before said row with mines disappears, shift-click flags on a mac. I'd recommend making your initial mine sweeper guesses across the top because you gain information about the mines in a dropped block only when it lands on exposed squares.

I strongly dislike them introducing rows form the bottom as well, but theoretically this helps you because eliminating all the rows costs you the information advantage of landing on exposed squares, turning the game into tetris with random death. Imho, they should introduce those bottom rows mostly exposed, except for unflagged mines when playing in easy mode.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:06 PM on February 15, 2012


Works in Chrome on Windows for me.
posted by XMLicious at 11:07 PM on February 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


I have never, ever been able to figure out Minesweeper. I am a goddess of Tetris. But Minesweeper is my undoing.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 11:25 PM on February 15, 2012


Oh god, my fucking brains. This is too much.
posted by tmt at 12:43 AM on February 16, 2012


Shift-click? SHIFT-CLICK? Christ, I hate Flash.

Brilliant game, though.
posted by alexei at 1:28 AM on February 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


If they could somehow add Freecell, they'd have the mid-90s office worker trifecta.
posted by nobody at 5:24 AM on February 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


Also: this is great. A much more elegant game than it at first appears.
posted by nobody at 5:24 AM on February 16, 2012


The Tetris implementation is good, but the Minesweeper gameplay could use some work: most modern engines are set to make it impossible to lose on your first click.
posted by fifthrider at 5:32 AM on February 16, 2012


I've been playing Minecraft Sweeper on my phone lately, and this is pretty harsh by comparison.
posted by Foosnark at 5:38 AM on February 16, 2012


Imagine you're eating your soup and your beefsteak with a spork. With two sporks. And you can't swallow your soup until you chew the meat thoroughly.
I tried the game and that's how it felt.
posted by hat_eater at 5:47 AM on February 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


If you're having trouble, go to the free mode, it doesn't start with half the screen filled.
posted by Joe Chip at 6:04 AM on February 16, 2012


Absolutely awesome, thanks spitefulcrow! :)

Previously - MamonoSweeper, a MineSweeper with some RPG elements; also great (and also from Japan).

Just for the record - works fine on Win+Chrome for me.
posted by egor83 at 6:21 AM on February 16, 2012


Tetris + Bejeweled + Scrabble = puzzlejuice. "Puzzlejuice is a game that will punch your brain in the face", says the website. Yes. Yes it will.

Drop the Tetris pieces to make lines which turn into letters out of which you must spell words to remove the lines. Oh and if you make blocks of a color you can turn those into letters as well. This game uses so many parts of your brain at once the magic smoke will come out of your ears. If you have an iOS device get it. Or don't. Maybe don't.
posted by The Bellman at 6:59 AM on February 16, 2012


This game is clever and combines my interests. I quickly picked up the habit of watching the total mine count like a hawk since it let me expose a lot of blank squares and a few mines without anything else to go on. I really miss left+right clicking to clear around a number, but the blocks fall slowly enough that it is not necessary. I wish the author would place the initial mines upon the first click since hitting a mine randomly at the beginning is dumb luck and pointless (many Minesweeper clones get this wrong. It's so easy to write!) Also, the block flipping code occasionally does not allow a flip next to the edge of the field when it normally would in Tetris. And yes, I'd like to see a JavaScript game with right-click to flag (and multiplayer and better performance in modern browsers and Tetris-style music selection.)
posted by michaelh at 7:56 AM on February 16, 2012


That Sugar, Sugar game missed what would be the most interesting thing about it... a gallery of people's solutions.
posted by cmoj at 9:27 AM on February 16, 2012 [2 favorites]




The free play mode at the end of Sugar, Sugar was a bit of a letdown as well. I'd have preferred a level creator.

Still, it held me captive for hours on end. Level 19 took a long time to find an elegant solution for.
posted by flabdablet at 11:11 AM on February 16, 2012


Just in case you thought you were good at Tetris :P

Does that version allow the player to call down a piece in reserve mode? What's the pattern there?
posted by michaelh at 11:22 AM on February 16, 2012


Shift-click? SHIFT-CLICK? Christ, I hate Flash.

Isn't Shift-Click the default mine-mark in any minesweeper game?

Count me in the awesome camp. I'm guessing that it will appeal to classic minesweeper fans and not classic Tetris fans.
posted by mrgrimm at 4:22 PM on February 16, 2012


Nah, I'm a Minesweeper fan rather than a Tetris fan and I'm not liking this. The thing I enjoyed about Minesweeper was figuring out the five-step or ten-step or n-step conditional logic to figure out where the mines were, or at least what the probability there was a mine under any given square was... in this thing there isn't enough time to do that and you end up being forced to simply guess when you could have been certain if you had more time.

And actually, although I think you're right about Shift-click in the original Minesweeper, most of my games have ended when in the course of switching back and forth between the Tetris keys and clicking I accidentally hold down the wrong key and click on a bomb when I just meant to flag it.
posted by XMLicious at 5:06 PM on February 16, 2012


you end up being forced to simply guess when you could have been certain if you had more time

You don't guess ... you get FASTER.
posted by mrgrimm at 5:13 PM on February 16, 2012


And actually, although I think you're right about Shift-click in the original Minesweeper, most of my games have ended when in the course of switching back and forth between the Tetris keys and clicking I accidentally hold down the wrong key and click on a bomb when I just meant to flag it.

Yep. Upon further play, this issue is fairly critical in this Flash game. I'm getting a lot of clicks when I shift click because I'm clicking too fast.
posted by mrgrimm at 5:14 PM on February 16, 2012


Also, in Minesweeper, there was/is the all important Shift-CTRL-click on numbers when you want to expose all unmarked adjacent squares, i.e. mark the bomb with a flag and then shift-ctrl-click the 1 to clear all the other squares around it. That is a critical omission.
posted by mrgrimm at 5:16 PM on February 16, 2012


most of my games have ended when in the course of switching back and forth between the Tetris keys and clicking I accidentally hold down the wrong key and click on a bomb when I just meant to flag it.

I've been keeping my hands in one place: index, middle, and ring fingers on the WASD keys and pinky on the left shift key.

I also don't feel like I've been doing much guessing, apart from a few random clicks to start things off. (though even that's strictly speaking unnecessary, since you can keep an eye on the total-number-of-mines count and so start off by waiting until some of the newly dropped pieces are completely safe to click on.

That said, I don't really know how the strategies I've been using stack up. I think my highest score so far is 118,516. There's at least one MeFi score on there today that's twice as high (and of course the all-time high scores are around 20 times as high).
posted by nobody at 8:29 PM on February 16, 2012


Nah, I'm a Minesweeper fan rather than a Tetris fan and I'm not liking this. The thing I enjoyed about Minesweeper was figuring out the five-step or ten-step or n-step conditional logic to figure out where the mines were, or at least what the probability there was a mine under any given square was... in this thing there isn't enough time to do that and you end up being forced to simply guess when you could have been certain if you had more time.

There isn't any more time for that in Minesweeper, if you want to beat your old score at any rate.
posted by michaelh at 8:39 PM on February 16, 2012


IIRC the game doesn't end if you take too long. Racing always seemed kind of pointless to me since to a great degree it's a matter of luck if you run into a puzzle that can be quickly solved.
posted by XMLicious at 8:51 PM on February 16, 2012


It's like a computer game version of chess-boxing. The fast pace of Tetris where a mistake hurts, but you can recover from it, and the slow methodical processing of minesweeper where a errors are fatal. I love it!

(Also, that wasn't good at Tetris, this is.)
posted by fragmede at 9:53 AM on February 17, 2012


(Oh, and It's the same video, but jumped to the even more impressive part at the end.)
posted by fragmede at 9:57 AM on February 17, 2012


Guess who just learned he sucks at multitasking?
posted by Deathalicious at 6:36 AM on February 23, 2012


I should've posted rrrrthats5rs.com's tetris here before. ;)
posted by jeffburdges at 9:55 AM on March 13, 2012


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