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The Eggs Files II: Step 4, Kill All Humans.
(So, after mentioning The Eggs Files recently, and seeing some visual identify-the-movie posts, I figured I should write up this stage of the party. Very, very late.)
The blue eggs held clues reading 500, 5, 500, disc, The Full _______, Very large snake, deceased, talking bird, music with words, and man with an axe. These clues lead to disc three of the complete DVD set of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Inside the case, instead of classic British television, there was an optical disc and an insert.
The insert was on one page, folded over. On the front, there was an alien communication from Private Flack entitled "The Fourth Step: Kill all humans." On the back, there was a series of blank spaces. The disc, when placed in a DVD player, showed a repeating loop of stills from famous movies, all showing people who were dead, dying, about to die, or undead. By identifying the movies in order and putting them in the blanks, you could form an acrostic leading to a place near my house with the final golden egg.
Background and Construction
Identifying movies is fun. I enjoy it at the MIT Mystery Hunt; I enjoy it when it's a LJ meme. It's fun. So I figured it would be a good idea to put it in my hunt. I imagined that it would be something my Dad and my sister could get into. I also thought it would be good to use a different medium to keep things spread around my house, so the DVD idea fit nicely.
When I was creating this, I was watching a lot of Futurama, so I wanted to have a whole Bender theme going on. This got progressively harder, and so I eventually didn't do it, but I still liked the "Kill All Humans" theme, so I started working with it.
After a little while, I realized that it was going to be a bit rough finding lots of movies with corpses while keeping a range of movies and not, you know, grossing everyone out. I had to make a few trips to the video store to rent movies, which I then watched in double time to scan for dead bodies. And, I needed it to be difficult enough to be interesting, but not so hard that people would be completely stumped. It's really, really hard to give clues for something like this, and I didn't want to have to. A few missing films would be okay, but most needed to be guessable. I think I did a good job getting everything together, and I'm still proud of the results. I tried to use films that I knew had been seen by people who were going to attend the party, like my dad. I used whatever dinky little program came with my computer to smash the stills together with some transition effects into an video file, and I burned it onto a VCD.
As I prepared the accompanying communique, I worried that less experienced puzzlers wouldn't key in to an answer acrostic very quickly. To compensate, I made the first letter on each line a much larger font than the rest, which I hoped would be enough. The blanks were meant to tell the solvers where the breaks between words were, so that they would have a better idea of whether they were on the right track.
I was very worried about this puzzle, so I test-solved it on a few groups. In that process, I discovered that I had the wrong title for one of the answers. I relied on the box at the video store, even though that was not the original title. And, of course, it wrecked the acrostic. Sadly, with the time dedicated to preparing the other puzzles, I did not have time to find a replacement. So I had to advise the solvers personally that the answer to number twelve should be the newer title.
Agents in Action
Artistry and/or![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cramerica didn't even need the all of the clues to know that they were looking for a Python DVD, and they immediately started ransacking my collection. They did not notice that I had clued a specific disc, but they opened each one quickly and found the right answer.
This one got solved mostly without my supervision. The film got rolling, and I looked over once in a while. If I recall correctly, it was mostly solved bywjukknibs and cramerica, with occasional input from others. When they couldn't figure out any of the remaining films, they looked at their answer and thought they had enough. wjukknibs recognized the location, and they were off. It was all very low-key compared to the others.
The solvers didn't notice the blanks until very late, and they caught on to the acrostic very quickly. This was definitely the smoothest-running puzzle of the day.
Now, I mentioned the movie identification meme. I'm going to display the screen-shots in my next entry. Rules and such will be there.
The blue eggs held clues reading 500, 5, 500, disc, The Full _______, Very large snake, deceased, talking bird, music with words, and man with an axe. These clues lead to disc three of the complete DVD set of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Inside the case, instead of classic British television, there was an optical disc and an insert.
The insert was on one page, folded over. On the front, there was an alien communication from Private Flack entitled "The Fourth Step: Kill all humans." On the back, there was a series of blank spaces. The disc, when placed in a DVD player, showed a repeating loop of stills from famous movies, all showing people who were dead, dying, about to die, or undead. By identifying the movies in order and putting them in the blanks, you could form an acrostic leading to a place near my house with the final golden egg.
Background and Construction
Identifying movies is fun. I enjoy it at the MIT Mystery Hunt; I enjoy it when it's a LJ meme. It's fun. So I figured it would be a good idea to put it in my hunt. I imagined that it would be something my Dad and my sister could get into. I also thought it would be good to use a different medium to keep things spread around my house, so the DVD idea fit nicely.
When I was creating this, I was watching a lot of Futurama, so I wanted to have a whole Bender theme going on. This got progressively harder, and so I eventually didn't do it, but I still liked the "Kill All Humans" theme, so I started working with it.
After a little while, I realized that it was going to be a bit rough finding lots of movies with corpses while keeping a range of movies and not, you know, grossing everyone out. I had to make a few trips to the video store to rent movies, which I then watched in double time to scan for dead bodies. And, I needed it to be difficult enough to be interesting, but not so hard that people would be completely stumped. It's really, really hard to give clues for something like this, and I didn't want to have to. A few missing films would be okay, but most needed to be guessable. I think I did a good job getting everything together, and I'm still proud of the results. I tried to use films that I knew had been seen by people who were going to attend the party, like my dad. I used whatever dinky little program came with my computer to smash the stills together with some transition effects into an video file, and I burned it onto a VCD.
As I prepared the accompanying communique, I worried that less experienced puzzlers wouldn't key in to an answer acrostic very quickly. To compensate, I made the first letter on each line a much larger font than the rest, which I hoped would be enough. The blanks were meant to tell the solvers where the breaks between words were, so that they would have a better idea of whether they were on the right track.
I was very worried about this puzzle, so I test-solved it on a few groups. In that process, I discovered that I had the wrong title for one of the answers. I relied on the box at the video store, even though that was not the original title. And, of course, it wrecked the acrostic. Sadly, with the time dedicated to preparing the other puzzles, I did not have time to find a replacement. So I had to advise the solvers personally that the answer to number twelve should be the newer title.
Agents in Action
Artistry and/or
cramerica didn't even need the all of the clues to know that they were looking for a Python DVD, and they immediately started ransacking my collection. They did not notice that I had clued a specific disc, but they opened each one quickly and found the right answer.This one got solved mostly without my supervision. The film got rolling, and I looked over once in a while. If I recall correctly, it was mostly solved by
wjukknibs and cramerica, with occasional input from others. When they couldn't figure out any of the remaining films, they looked at their answer and thought they had enough. wjukknibs recognized the location, and they were off. It was all very low-key compared to the others.The solvers didn't notice the blanks until very late, and they caught on to the acrostic very quickly. This was definitely the smoothest-running puzzle of the day.
Now, I mentioned the movie identification meme. I'm going to display the screen-shots in my next entry. Rules and such will be there.