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.
