Yet Another Birthday Treat (6 games) (Solutions)

That recent clue confirmed my fears... You are an evil person V_V

Nonsense that it's nonsense! o.O

Thanks for the compliment

You and me buddy, you and me both...

Maybe this will help?

Negative numbers are real, so why not give it a shot? =P

Were you the 4th or the 5th player to reach the last part? I'm the third and apparently I'm also a mouse. :P

Congratz on solving this, I have no idea how you and Ecwcwwe made it.

EDIT: Solved now. I feel really stupid for not noticing this waaaay before.

Also, even though it's late, happy birthday OP!

It's here all week long, so take your time. :)

What if I say it doesn't...

22 people got stuck at the most fun part? it's a shame. maybe we should BUMP it once in a while.

apply the knowledge to ... where?

The "/2".

Either I have no idea, or the idea I have seems too tedious. So.

Yay! =)

Yes, both games can be won with completing the puzzle...

Use the hint file and slow it down: some useful tool. And like I said, you just have to break the code of the first few bits, and then giyf. :)

Sure. :)

Entrance: if you look at the urls (hint 1) of the pictures you see incomplete query strings at the end. Join all the pieces and you get to the next stage: a mysterious picture. Hint 1 also gives you a picture with some weird text: Hooch Test: Museum Level. One of the oldest ways to conceal hidden messages, is to use the first letter of each word. Here also the last letter of each word spells HTML. That should have led you to looking at the source, or do some other stuff you associate with HTML (like the query strings). The hint also said to check the URL, and in the url you could find "look".

The picture (1): If you look for the picture, you should find it's some concept art from Tron. Combine that with the "end of line" bit and you find that the programs in Tron use it to end communication. So, you should go and find the last bit of the picture and you can do that with notepad (hint 2.1).

The picture (2): Once you open it with notepad, you find a weird message about "colours in RGB" and the "Huehuehue" comment. The picture is a .gif, so you should change the colours from "indexed colour" to "RGB", and then change the hue of the picture, just like the message said. You can do that with the well-known Photoshop (PS) or Gimp (Hint 2.2). Then you would find a 8 letter code, that leads you to "it's too hard". Also the text on the picture explicitly says: the next hint is at the end of the line, so you might have started to search there.

Stage 3: Questions. The first question wasn't too hard to find, I think. Each line (except the first) was about a Tomb Raider game. If you couldn't find anything, you could have spotted the weird last word "lates". If you examine the last letters of each sentence, you can see it spells "Natla's Mines", one of the most memorable levels in TR1, for me at least. The hint gave you an audio file in the Venice levels in TR2, and I also left the song name in the properties, so you could search for that.

The next bit was a lot harder. Maybe not to figure out what the code was, but to extract it. The drum line was morse code. Each four beats represent a letter. The snare was a dot, the toms/bass drum was a dash, and I filled it up with a "hand clap" sound to make it not so obvious what to look for. In the hint I put all the words apart, and at the end I added the ... --- ... (SOS) to really guide you to the morse code. In the last hint (hint 3.b), I removed the hand claps, and only left the dots and dashes. If you decode it, you find: "From this moment your every breath is a gift from me". Lara says this to Amanda (answer) in TR: Underworld. The hint there was "take it slow" (slow the bpm of the file) and "remorse" (morse code).

Last stage: The ultimate question!
Which game am I giving away? If you look at all the hints posted throughout the entire puzzle, you'll see they are at the end of words, sentences, urls, ... Everything is at the end. You just had to look at each puzzle, and take the final word of each one. You'd get "special", "(the) line" and "operations". With those words you can make "Spec ops: the line", and that was it.

So, in the end (of course), I can only say congratulations to the six who found the giveaways!