Japanese Puzzles 2.0

CNet has an article on the "democratisation" of puzzle-creation by Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli. The article goes into how people/readers can submit their own, freshly-invented kind of puzzle for consideration, as well as into some history and reasons for why Japanese puzzles came about.

I, for one, welcome any new Slitherlink overlords that may happen to infiltrate us.

Get out of *that*!

OK, I admit it, I'm stuck.

Sphere - "Escape from the locked room" - is a simple point-and-click puzzle thing, with the object of the game being pretty clear. You can click on things to interact, use objects you pick up by clicking on them, look at them closely by selecting the magnifying glass, etc. I've got a fair way in (I think) but I've run out of ideas now. Thankfully, you can also save and load your position to come back to it later.

All in all, a great fun little game - very reminiscent of Myst et al, but any hints as to how to proceed would be greatly appreciated... ;)

Perplex City 2.0 is Go

So, once again I've been neglecting my blogging duties, tut. The new Perplex City website has been launched a little while ago, featuring a veritable plethora of puzzles that are free to play. These include Japanese puzzles, so all you sudoku, hitori, hashi/bridges/"ponturu", etc fans can get an interactive fix. In addition, there are plenty of word-based puzzles such as crosswords and rebuses (rebii?), various visual puzzles, and some rather addicitive flash games lurking in the sidebar too. Phew. Ought to keep you going for quite a while.

Regarding the ARG and the cards, which were the part of season 1, these look like they're being "separated"s lightly. The first wave of new puzzle cards were released yesterday (and can be bought from many places, including Firebox), although it looks like the PXC technical team are working their socks extra hard, as the functionality to actually enter solves on the site has been delayed until today. (5pm, apparently.) Meanwhile, the ARG side of things is set to go in April, over at Perplex City Stories, with fancy new video and everything. Could be an interesting ride.

So, opinion? The new site has a great range of puzzles that have kept me clicking for hours now. There are a lot of nice and easy puzzles, but a few ones that look pretty evil too. Alas, it does seem that quite a few of particular puzzle types - e.g. wordplay ones - have been taken straight from the board game, so some possible deja vu/spoilers there. What's great though is the integration of the puzzle creation tools. It looks like you're still limited to multiple-choice, which is a shame in a way (although maybe this is for future use in some "Slamboozle" feature they mention...), but it's nice to see the community aspect continue. The cards themselves are looking just as devilish as ever, too. The map of Perplex City on the back has gone, but I won't give away what's replaced it.

So go have a play with it all, if you haven't already. More free puzzles, who can complain? :)

An Update on NIN: Year Zero "arg"

The NIN Year Zero "ARG" (unfiction thread) is continuing apace into ever more intriguing climes. 3 days ago, one of the tracks from the forthcoming album was found on a USB key in a toilet stall at a gig. Static at the end of the song reveals an image of The Presence, which is lurking darkly beneath the ARG-like story so far.

Interesting times...

The Malice Box Quest has started

Meant to blog this the other day, but ended up going away instead. Oops. Ah well, I don't think it's too late to sign up for the Malice Box Quest yet.

The basic premise: The Malice Box is bad, but needs Red Gold to go off. By locating the 7 locations of Red Gold around the Earth, you can stop it going off. 7 rounds of 3 questions/puzzles each are released over a month. The more questions you get correct, the better your chance of getting the Red Gold's location correct. The 7 locations then give you a clue to where the Malice Box is, so the better your location guesses are, the more likely to find the final location (+ the more chances of guessing you get).

Nice idea, and nicely implemented - you browse around Google Maps to place your guesses. So far the puzzles (1 round) have been quite varied, plus even if you can just Google them, you still need to do some digging to work out how the answers fit together for a location. Plus it's only a month...

Monitoring Progress

Just spent a fun few minutes going through Fields of logic, a game of, uh, logic - "work out what to do one each level" kind of thing. Took me less than a quarter of an hour, apparently, so nice little timewaster. On to its predecessor, next... Oh, and a big thoughtful post coming soon, I hope :)



(Via Jay is Games.)