So, loyal Mistigris treasure hunt puzzlers. It’s been a while. I was hoping that more people would, given the keys past our first puzzle, blitz a bit further into the puzzle series, but it looks like things didn’t quite unfold that way – of the 37 people who tried the first puzzle, only 12 of them found their way through to the next one (I know, even after I spoiled it!), and only 4 of those 12 have made their way through this puzzle to the next… so let’s see if I can’t just explain the rest of the puzzle solutions in short order before we can finally give MIST2000 a wide public release and also bask in the glow of the rapidly-approaching MIST1014 artpack celebrating Mistigris’ 21st anniversary!
So, where were we? The treasure hunt was announced. I spoiled the first puzzle, an acrostic in a poem in ROT13 in an old archive format. (Does that make it four puzzles? Very economical, good value!) Then it (as do they all) pointed to a bit.ly URL – specifically, bit.ly/wetakeBerlin … which served up a file named ii.arc … now, I thought I was being cute by packaging the puzzles in historical file compression archive formats, just icing the cake in a period-appropriate sort of way, but it caused more problems for people than I’d anticipated it would:
Happyfish> @mistfunk WHAT THE FUCK FORMAT IS THIS ARC FILE I HAVE INSTALLED 4 ARCHIVE PROGRAMS ON MY TERMINAL
(… @mistfunk favorites my tweet of pain. LE SIGH)
Cthulu> @hsifyppah predecessor to PKZIP, it held on in Atari ST circles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_%28file_format%29
HF> I determined that, but everything keeps telling me it’s corrupt and can’t open it.
HF> Although I admit I spent a minute going IS THIS A NINTENDO ROM I AM GOING TO HURT CTHULU
HF> Bwahaha, searching for PKUNPAK, google says “Did you mean Pkunk?”
HF> USUALLY I WOULD, GOOGLE, USUALLY I WOULD
HF> Dee dee dee, now in to the hundreds of megabytes downloaded to try to open this 680 byte file THE FUTURE IS HERE
HF> This one has a super ugly pixelated logo, so I feel hopeful.
CT> This was intended to be a nominal, old-school flavor endowing aspect to the puzzle, not a major speed bump
Anyhow, supposing you were able to open the archive at all, what you ended up with was a file named 00000010.asc (that is the number 2 in binary, much as the archive’s name is the number 2 in Roman numerals – you should be seeing a trend from here on), whose contents looked like this:
OK, it’s not much for ASCII art. Mea culpa. I was thinking I could do something fun with Figlet (or hey: my infernal puzzle – read this graffiti logo! Sorry, it’s just too phresh, I can’t make any of it out) but I needed to roll my own with this custom character set. An alternate alphabet? O RLY? It hadn’t occurred to me to use the Standard Galactic Alphabet from the Commander Keen games or I surely would have, but this one’s source is equally nerdy and well-clued. Googling snatches of the phrases will lead you to Taito’s 1986 arcade platformer Bubble Bobble, within which is hidden secret levels – treasure rooms. As you play the game, on standard levels occasionally temporary doorways will appear in the background. Moving Bub or Bob to them will bring players inside these rooms, where treasure is to be found in great abundance, and down on the floor, cryptic messages are spelled out:
Now, there are a few approaches to deciphering a message coded in this way. Last time around, we discussed falling back on letter-frequency analysis, but in this case a bit of poking around online reveals the fact that somebody has already done the hard work:
Running my colourless high-ASCII blocks (I’m very sorry folks, forgetting that there’s a greater distinction between ANSI and ASCII besides the use of colours, using high-ASCII can result in garbled character display for some viewers) through this code reveals the Latin message “omne trium perfectum”, which as it turns out is the next destination: bit.ly/omnetriumperfectum
HF> Finally got in to it with PKUNPAK in a dosbox.
CT> I fully expect you have blasted through all of the other puzzles by now.
HF> Oh, no, I’m cussing at the bubble bobble symbols and getting lots of sketchy, wrong bit.ly results
HF> Either that or one was correct, but my workplace firewall doesn’t trust you. Heh.
HF> Hah! Yes, the firewall was just blocking it. Got it on another terminal.
CT> How curious it would grant you access to one file but not another literally sitting next to it in the same directory.
HF> The block file is capricious and mysterious.
Next time – puzzle #3! (You don’t need to wait for me to spoil it, you could very well just dash on over there and try to scoop me! I’m told that the puzzles get easier as they progress… or maybe your oldschool reptile brain just gets warmed up?)
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