As my first foray into the Eat My Bomb ‘hood I wanted to make a splash. I wanted something more exciting than the run-of-the-mill FPS or Diablo clone. But where to find such a game?

so I went to The Source:

It seems that nestled within each and every Windows machine there is the origin of all gaming - yes, the devilish MineSweeper. Given my fair amount of gaming experience I believed this game would be unable to withstand my mad CounterStrike twitch skills. And it all started well enough - the game’s main interface is clean and well thought out. There is no HUD to speak of, and a friendly companion avatar helps beginners guide thier progress (more on this demonspawn later).

“He doesnt look so tough…”

Quickly, however, I realized this was no average game . As fast as it had began, it was over - in a single click my best laid plans were laid to waste. Here is the most glaringly frustrating part of the game for users - there seemed to be no logical way to plan my attack. Underneath each apparently identical square lays one of a possible SIX tiles. My calculus skills not being what they used to, I was forced to retreat to Excel to determine the possible permutations and script my next moves. The second try proved as good as the first; at which point the glaring lack of save points becomes noticeable.

wipe that face off your head, Smiley…

After about a dozen restarts (at least the load times are reasonable) I began to see a pattern emerge. Every time a tile is selected to be revealed, the little smiley face cheers to show its approval. While I looked for a way to turn off this spoiler so that I could enjoy the game as it was meant to be played - I was shocked to find that HE LIED! What I thought was an in game aid was actually an evil NPC trying to trick the user. Needless to say, I would not fall prey to the useless emoticon again.

Sadly, after hours of play I was left with nothing to show for my hard work. Many times the user comes close to finishing the first quest, only to be thwarted by a broken scripting error that forces a restart. As such, I can not gauge the replayability of the game at this time - but based on my experience, total gameplay for this one would be about 1-68 hours

The absence of well written documentation and a limited choice of only one character class makes me think this game was only half baked when they took it out of the oven. A new version of this game is due out in 2006 - here’s hoping the folks at Redmond listen up to my criticism if they want to keep thier customers coming back. At $99, with no multiplayer options in sight - I’d recommend you leave this one in the bargin bin.