Mine Sweeper

The classic puzzle game for SEGA Saturn

about

The game is a contribution to the segaXtreme Saturn Coding Contest 2003 and won the 3rd place. Although the original MineSweeper is a small game, my Saturn version has got a rich feature list. There is a 2 player match mode that you never have seen in any Mine Sweeper game before!

View some screenshots.

features

1 and 2 player support

-> cool 2 player matches

PCM sound FX and voice

sprites for playing field

big highscore table

playing field adjustment

-> customize player names, width, height and number of bombs

backup file for configuration and highscore table

really cool replay system:

save them to or load them from system memory, cartridge or external device

share them via PAR->PC transfer, cartridge or NetLink eMail

watch 1 and 2 player replays

-> any two replays can be combined to form a 2 player replay

adjust the accuracy

-> compression is really good

up to 99 replays per memory device

demo play

in game manual

future

A collection of future plans for a post-contest Mine Sweeper. Note that none of that are included in the download above, they are only in my WIP version. Check my site to be informed when it will be released.

CDDA music support

yeah! this is kind of finished, only little changes could be necessary later

multi language support for text display

this is nearly complete for english and german language

french is planned, of course, if I find someone who helps with translation

other languages if someone requests it and/or can help translate

multi language support for in game voice

this is kind of more difficult, as it invokes heavier changes. But these changes have other advantages, so there is motivation to do so.

additional similar games

yes, it is easy to implement similar games with the existing MineSweeper sources

I think of slide puzzle, columns, tetris, 4 wins and all that I forgot or don't know

about the development

Man am I glad to have it out! Especially the last days I thought every day: "I have not expected this being so difficult." And every next day prooved that it could be even more difficult. You have to know that the Mine Sweeper game was even playable on it's first day of creation: 1st of may 2003. But of course I was not satified with that and all features mentioned above took up some time to implement. Especially the replay system, backup memory access and the PCM sound because I had to improve my conversion tool SSwavetools (which is now RB_SaturnPCM).

Maybe it's interesting for some of you to hear that there were some problems that made me think it would be my faith not being able to finish this game. Stupid as I am, I destroyed my only Saturn suitable for testing. Then I failed repairing the damaged Saturn with another damaged console due to model difference. My old japanese Saturn has incompatebilities with some controller access from SGL libraries, so no testing with it. My other Saturn wasn't able being modded, so no CD testing with it. No (free) emulator was able to support the sound, so only testing with sound disabled. And finally, the biggest and only second hand Saturn shop had no consoles left. But as you see on the photos below, I succeeded with the swap trick and burned a lot of CD's.

thanks

Thanks to all Saturn fans and the Saturn dev community at segaXtreme. I'm sure: Sunday will be a great day for the SEGA Saturn.

The Rockin'-B