Yo dawg, I heard you like puzzles, so I put a puzzle in your puzzle, so you can solve puzzles while you solve puzzles!

Pimp my Quiz!

Reward is Counter Strike: Global Offensive Beta. Giveaway starts roughly in 25 minutes, and ends on next Friday, 7:00 PM, GMT+1. Hints are given away if noone solves it on the weekend. You'll hate me for this...

Tip #1 for Question #5: It's on Steam and it is also free (the Steam version ain't free though). Placed third on a themed competition on TIGSource.

Tip #2 for Question #8: The form in which to put it is something like this: if I was to write down the Pythagoras theorem, then it would have looked like this: A2+B2=C2. If I was to write down the equasion for the area of a circle, then it would look like A=πr2 (where A is the Area, π is pi and r is the radius). It should be extremely easy now

Tip #3: After the quiz, you have to do 3 things in the right order to get the giveaway code. The order in which you do it is up to you, there's only 6 variations anyway and they're easy to do.

Tip #4: The quiz description is vital for solving the puzzle. Read it VERY thouroughly and note that I made absolutely zero typoes and/or mistakes when I posted it. Every detail matters.

Tip #5: Question #3: The green harvestable was called Tiberium. Extremely easy now.

Tip #6: Question #4: It is the single most given-away game on Steamgifts. The developer was kind enough to give away a huge load of it, look up a lot of people, most of them have won it.

Tip #7: Question #5: The theme of its competition hugely involved Lovecraft. See also Tip #1.

Tip #8: Question #7: Use Google. I intended to harden your work by not including some key elements from the box art, yet google brings out the good result when you search for some keywords from the question.

Tip #9: On how to proceed after the quiz, I show you the order in which you'll have to do things:

First, use the results of the questions again, as hinted at in the description.

Secondly, find a clue in the description of the quiz on what to do. It's a bleak hint, but if you look for "errors", you have a good start. Google won't help you with that.

And lastly, you get something familiar. You know what to do with it after that, trust me. (Not the giveaway code yet).

Now I should have made this extremely easy to solve, so have at it!

HUGE EDIT - Sorry for everyone, the second part of the puzzle was flawed by one tiny bit. I posted it below, but here's the fix for it again:


Oh crap, I dun goofed...
You guys were right, I messed up one number from the answer at the end of the quiz. To fix it, just make it that the fourth number should be eight times smaller than its current self.
Sorry for everybody, I failed with this bigtime now D: Let's see if anyone can solve it like this within the next 5 hours, if not, I'll give away the code at the end of the alternative quiz.

Still open for 10 hours, let's see if you can solve it in the next 5 hours.

Last edit here, the giveaway ended and congratulations for our sole entry, Usagi, for winning and solving this actually pretty hard puzzle. Sorry for everyone if you missed this just because of my mistakes in it, I owe you all one. But hopefully there will be another, not-so-flawed puzzle in the future as well.

Here be the solutions:

Questions: 1: Neo Geo, 2:Gina Cross, 3:Command & Conquer, 4: Faerie Solitaire, 5: Eversion, 6: Mortal Kombat, 7: Lula 3D, 8: E=mc2

After you answered all of that, you got something like this:

<ch>
I./5
II./1
III./14
IV./8
V./1
VI./8
VII./1
VIII./2
</ch>

Now, the <ch> thingy means you are looking for characters. The roman numbers represent the numbers of the questions, and the arabic ones represent which character you need from those. So, from question 1 you needed character 5, which was C, as space counts as a character as well.

If you deciphered that, you got this: GGqFEKL=

Now, that should be the familiar thing I mentioned. Most people recognize it as a Base64 code, but your task was not to decode it yet. First, you had to look for another hint, that was mentioned in the Step 2 part. And it was the &amp13; thingy. & in itself is some code to replace the regular "&" symbol, some downloaded files do that to me all the time. The 13 is quite out of place there, and it is your hint. It meant, you had to do a very basic Rot13 decode on your familiar thing first, which made it into this:

TTdSRXY=

Now you had to decode it (base64) which brought you this:

M7REv

And that's it! Thanks all for playing, see you next time!

1 decade ago*

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I only missed the base64 bit
used rot13.com even :)

1 decade ago
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by the way there is an error there it is GGqFeKL= and not GGqFEKL= go to steam and check the game name and also the logo

1 decade ago
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1 decade ago
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1 decade ago
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also your logo in the background is lower case

1 decade ago
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the game logo from the game developers is clearly lowercase. What steam named it in your library..... not official.

Basically.... your quiz (while solvable through trial and error by 1 person) was full of errors.

I would love to do another similar quiz, but I recommend paying more attention to the small details (I know there are A LOT of details in this quiz).

1 decade ago
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^^ This.

OP: (Please do not consture this as an attack on your person) Might I suggest if you do run another quiz in this manner, to have a third party check your wording and phrasing? Especially when it comes to wordplay. And once that's done double check your results.

1 decade ago
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Oh I'm always open for cc, and frankly, I messed this up pretty bigtime. Thanks for the advice, I'll make sure to do that next time.

1 decade ago
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Also, I think there was another misunderstanding there, the part where you said "Most people recognize it as a Base64 code"... I'm not sure why that would be. There's literally nothing to distinguish that string as being in base 64. (This is coming from someone who is a programmer and whose handle is Radix, so... it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the concept.) So while that might have been something that people could have tried, the fact that you were saying that it should be familiar at that point was kind of a red herring, dude.

You also told a guy that the &13; part wasn't an error, but you told us to be looking for errors! Now I know what you meant, though!

But I thought the first part of the quiz was great, you didn't even need the hints in my opinion. It was fun. But yeah, double-check it next time, dude! Otherwise you're making a bunch of people potentially waste a bunch of their time.

1 decade ago
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Lots of puzzles here are containing binary/base64/hex text to translate. If you hang around a while, you will be familiar with it. And with rot13, too. :)
When you see gibberish (and often "=" at the end): it's base64, a bunch of 0s and 1s: binary. Here's a handy tool for these puzzles. And if it's not working, then comes rot13 (you rotate every letter by 13 places), maybe the new gibberish will work. :)
When none of the above is working, then you have a really hard puzzle to solve... :D

1 decade ago
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Gratz on winning the giveaway btw! ^_^

1 decade ago
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Thank you. :)

1 decade ago
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having said that, I missed the base64 step only, I take the shame hehe
it was a fine quiz, I own 3 SNK Neo Geo MVS and about 70 carts, that was easy and Lula was my "Tamagochi" for a while, lol
all in all questions were easy except the Q4 for me :P
keep them coming

1 decade ago
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Well I don't have a clue about Rot13 decode or base64 code. So it was a total waste of time, you could hint that one needs some knowledge about that field... It's like I would make a puzzle and you have to know about root locus (very fun thing in system control theory) to solve it. GGqFEKL= meant absolutely nothing to me, so that is my appeal, try to make clear who your target audience is.

1 decade ago
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Closed 1 decade ago by TheGreenFairy.