Microsoft celebrates 25 years' SOLITARY SELF-PLEASURE with GROUP SESSION May 18th marked the 25th anniversary of Microsoft giving the world its timewasting Solitaire app, so Redmond has come up with a fine way to celebrate – a card-clicking deathmatch for its staff. Redmond says “an internal competition among Microsoft employees kicks off today to determine who leads the leaderboards here”. That …
...but the versions of Solitaire from Vista onwards are not the same as the earlier versions (trust me my dad complained about it all the time). However you card run the old version by getting an XP machine and copying a few files across and running them...also works on Linux in WINE.
I don’t want to be a stick in the mud, but when they threw in Solitaire and Minesweeper it was pretty much the same time they threw out the BASIC interpreter. Not much to celebrate as far as I’m concerned!
A game of Solitaire gives you, what, 15 minutes of repetitive fun? BASIC has kept me entertained (intellectually and creatively) for 32 years, and counting.
Solitaire? Four king hell!
I'm fairly sure QBasic was supplied with all consumer versions of Windows until they switched to the NT kernel with XP. So that's only fourteen years ago.
It's absence is reasonably troubling, but not as bad as being chased by two simultaneous instances of the bird from the cage, at the same time as facing double ostriches. Or, worse, having to play the ZX Spectrum version with the messed-up physics.
Surely, if you are wanting a competition, The Hearts Network would be much more suitable. I particularly remember, you could make a regedit, and then see everyone's cards when you did a certain key combo. It took many weeks of lunchtimes before my colleagues caught on to that one. Ah, they were thick.
First, I'm always amused when people ask whether a user is into gaming, with the basis being how much computing power the user might actually need for a prospective laptop, for example. For me, the short answer is 'no'. I DO play Solitaire, but that is trivial in terms of computing power needed.
Windows Solitaire was, I must admit, a guilty pleasure. But it used drive me mad, first, with the frequecy with which there would be two IDENTICAL cards ( such as BOTH red sevens, say ) after the initial deal. Usually I asked it to deal AGAIN ( and got another identical pair ). Then I'd get to a stage in the game where although I thought I was losing, I thought there was SOMETHING I might be able to do. However Windows refused to help me.
( btw, it kept my 'score' as winning 13% of the time. Which was nice. )
That brought me to the Linux version which is something called KPatience which has several card games, the version most like Windows Solitaire being called Klondike. This is infinitely preferable to Windows' version. It holds your hand all the way and gives a running commentary. It says 'this game is winnable'; 'this game is lost' etc.
What is frustrating is when I make several good moves and THEN it says 'this game is lost'.
It even has a 'Hint' button that can say exactly where to move certain cards. It regularly tells me half a dozen card moves that I would otherwise manage to miss and in effect wins the game for me.
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