Photo in the header courtesy of Asep Saeful Bahri
I loved Solitaire.
Specifically, MS’s incarnation. I played it on our ancient desktops because we couldn’t afford any new games. I played it even when we could afford new games. When I discovered it was available on Android, I played it there, too.
I played it so much that I actually – for multiple years in a row- won every daily challenge.
Hell, I even did an April Fools thing for my old gaming site around Freecell.
That’s not to say that the game was perfect; It had it’s bugs, but overall it worked..
..Until it didn’t.
Recently Microslop (AKA Microsoft) seems to have let vibe coding lead the charge in “enhancing” the app.
These enhancements include numerous visual accessibility issues tied to obnoxious and unnecessary features (partial XP – originally a paid feature but later given out to everybody for whatever reason – would trigger toasts on top of cards with both being unreadable during the animation), but even worse is all the new bugs.
Modals no longer rendered in a readable format on mobile.. Despite this being a mobile app. They rendered in a desktop-style, scaled down for mobile, making the text exceptionally tiny for small mobile screens.
Of course, the most common modal was a failure to connect modal.
Sometimes you could just hit OK and keep going, and it would realize there was no failure to connect. This one was usually triggered by switching to a different app and coming back, but eventually it would just trigger after you finished a game.. And could not be cleared.
You’d hit “OK’, and it would just come back up again and again until you force-closed the app and re-opened.
But wait, there’s more!
A couple days ago I was playing, and that modal came up.. And I accidentally hit the “logout” button instead of “Ok”.
As it turns out, once I logged out, it became literally impossible to log back in.
Microslop’s auth is a dumpsterfire of fuckery in general; Trying to gain auth to a client’s Azure setup can result in a variety of fever-dream errors, workaround and shitbaggery (something I recently had to deal with).
Trying to sign back in to MS Solitaire?
Yeah, after a couple redirects I get an error page with no place to actually sign in on mobile.
So I said “fuck it”, and ditched years upon years of fucking insane stats in a game that I used to keep my mind active while waiting for code to compile, listening to podcasts, or just relaxing.
Now I play Mahjong to cleanse my palette.. And not the Microslop-developed version.
Fuck off Microslop.