After hours of procrastination, thousands of flags raised and tons of explosiæ* (and thus games lost), at last I've managed to beat the expert mode of the good old Minesweeper. That game took 206 seconds (3:26 minutes) to be completed, far from the world record. Now I feel realized.
* Of all the words coined in the 'Plurals' thread, my favorite is what I call the 'explosive series'. Taking 'explosion' as a base, Duke87 coined 'explosia', and I coined 'explosiæ'.
How large is the Expert grid (dimensions and number of mines)?
16x30 with 99 mines. So many.
PS Off-Topic: Not only your signature has Unicode characters, but also mine. In fact, every damn written thing in the internet has Unicode characters.
That's nice. Now try it in custom mode in 24x30 with 149 mines...
I used to play that game. I was never good at it, and never really got it.
Congrats.
I'm kinda surprised you've never done this before. What have you been wasting your finite existence doing instead? :-P
My best time at clearing Expert Minesweeper is 150 seconds, achieved on August 27, 2007 at approximately 11:20 PM (thank you screenshot metadata).
Been years since I've played, though. I tend to avoid such timewasting distractions these days - and besides which, newer versions of Windows don't come with it preloaded, so it isn't even on my current computer. I could go and harvest the EXE off an older machine, but why bother?
Fake trailer for Minesweeper movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs
Our mutual friend (dbrim on the forum here) introduced me to Jake back in 2006 and the first thing I recall about him that he was a record holder for Minesweeper.
My Expert record I think was in the 60s. I know my Beginner record was 6 and my Intermediate was in the low 30s.
My favorite version was max size (24x30) and 200 bombs. It was a nice step up from Expert with just a few guesses but also a few islands and some really fun gameplay. I beat that about 7 times in my playing days.
Twice I'd come to the final two spots of expert-level Minesweeper, and had chosen incorrectly both times.
At some point, your realize your strengths lay elsewhere, and I don't think I've played since (that was on Windows 3.1, so it's been a while).
A game that I haven' t played in a long time.
An old job did not remove the games that were loaded on the machine, so during slow times, I got familiar with the game and did pretty well.
My current job has removed all pre-installed games, so I don't have the same time.
But in this day, there are much more interesting games to play and theads on this forum to read, so haven't played minesweeper in a while.