minesweeper posts

It's one of the biggest time sinks that people who work in offices on PCs know so well. It's a game so addictive that some companies and governments have tried to ban folks from playing it at work. It's Minesweeper, which is perhaps the first true casual PC game.

Now comes word that a full adventure game based on Minesweeper may be in the works. G4TV reports that Revolution Software, the creators of the Broken Sword series, are developing such a project. According to the article the game is being developed by giving it real characters and a back story as to why the mines are there. This report uses a source that is not from Revolution Software so we are putting this in a "rumor" file until the developer makes it official.

Still, it's a bold concept. What's next? A game that has a back story for Solitaire?

As gamers, unless you're a Minesweeper junkie with an epic Peggle jones and no further aspirations, you're going to have to have a dedicated video card in your rig to get any kind of decent graphic performance.

Wait, what?

The short answer for why that's the case is: "Math is hard; let's go shopping." However, it's not us saying that, it's the CPU.

I know what you're thinking. "BI, the central processing unit... all it does is math!" Or perhaps, "You cheap bastard, you still owe me five bucks for your share of the beer last week." You're right, of course (about the CPU, anyway...). In terms of raw computational horsepower, a modern processor is a potent customer. However, of necessity, it's also a generalist.

In order to obtain truly prodigious performance, we need to bring in a specialist. That specialist is your video card. Think of it like this -- an Olympic decathlon competitor is in phenomenally good shape, and a world-class performer in ten different events, but in any single one of those, their lunch will be summarily eaten by someone who makes that their sole pursuit.