Microsoft are selling a Minesweeper "ugly" Christmas jumper
Tis the season to click bombies
After dropping the ball with Solitaire merch, Microsoft have now done right by Minesweeper with an "ugly" Christmas jumper turning one of the most iconic PC games of all time into a blocky Christmas tree. For £58 (plus shipping), you can tell all your festive friends how little work you actually did on your PC in the 1990s. It's not bad!
The Microsoft Minesweeper Ugly Sweater shows a Minesweeper grid in the shape of a Christmas tree and snow-capped mountains. I've had a look, and the numbers on the grid do seem to line up with a real game of Minesweeper too. It has the UI too, with scores (well, years), the reset button, and the minimise/maximise/close buttons. I don't go for novelty Christmas garb myself but it's pretty decent as it goes.
The jumper is available now in the Xbox Store for £57.95 (that's £83.88 including taxes and postage to the UK), though it is already sold-out in most sizes. Lot of people want to show off their dedication to slacking this festive season.
In the giving spirit, alongside this, Microsoft plan to donate $100,000 (£75k) to the excellent accessibility charity, AbleGamers. That's nice.
They've also whipped a few Christmas Minesweeper wallpapers into a zip file to use as Microsoft Teams camera backgrounds.
I adore Christmastime. The delightful part of autumn has ended, daylight basically doesn't happen, all the swimming and cycling I live for is now chuffing freezing (and a mite dangerous), and basically everything is cold and dark and miserable until April. Everything except Christmas. My lights went up weeks ago, I've taste-tested half the new Christmas snacks in the Tesco, I've been watching Christmas movies since Halloween ended, and I even subscribed to the Hallmark Channel's streaming service to get more (99p/month for the first three months, absolute steal). I used to be dead cynical about Christmas as a festival of commercialism but turns out, you can largely skip that and just have a nice time with colourful lights and loving memories with your nearest and dearest. This jumper's not for me but if you want it, go for it.