June 1993 - Minesweeper

Main COMPUTE section (sorry to be spending so much time on that, but the Gazette has gotten so sparse - plus in this part of my personal life I had switched to PCs for gaming, so that's where the nostalgia is for me) reviews Star Control 2, a truly lovely and epic game. (Heh, I remember back in my C64 days being pretty underwhelmed by the Commodore 64 port of the first game in the series... it wasn't terrible terrible but had only like half the number of ships, none of the in-ship pilot animations, etc.)

Unlike last month, this month features a game, but there was also an interesting program "Instant Art", it looks like it's using 1D Cellular Automata to make stuff like this:

Instant Art - Larry Cotton

Not bad! 1D CA are kind of interesting because you get non-trivial stuff but you can easily fully explore the space.

Speaking of grid-based, neighbor-counting amusements...

Minesweeper - Robert B. Cook

Unlike July 1989's "Mine Sweeper" this is just about the same as the Windows game. The primary differences are it does automagically clear a bunch of "known clear" spaces for you (which really is one of the delights of the Windows version, clicking on a square and seeing a sudden gratifying blossoming of safe spaces to work off of) and hitting a mine isn't game-ending, you just lose points. Rating:3/5