Here’s it is.

ClueChaser Puzzle Shirt by ClueChaser

So be quick and run over to Zazzle.com and be first in your area to proudly sport the new look.

It has become tremendously popular to exchange the subtitles for other more comical ones and have Hitler ranting about any current event under the sun. Nothing is overlooked. There are clips about what Hitler thinks about Obama, about the new Iphone, about Microsoft, about Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift during the grammy’s, and just about anything else you can think of. There are hundreds of these videos all over Youtube and other video sites.

I myself have made a few of these parodies. All of mine suggest that Hitler fancies himself a puzzle solving master and is upset that he can’t win any of the Cluechaser puzzle games. It’s all in good fun and in not meant as any kind of commmentary on Nazi’s, Jews, or the Holocaust.

As mentioned yesterday, one of the videos that I had lost and then found was a Downfall parody video. I happily posted it to Dailymotion.com to join the other two in the series that were already there (and have been for some time).

The other day I got an email from Dailymotion.com stating that my video was blocked because they had been notified that it included copyrighted material. They were of course referring to the Downfall movie.

In the last year or so, Constantin Films, the makers of the Downfall movie have been working to have all parody clips removed. I don’t want to get into the legalities of it all except to say that the movie is probably more well known now because of the parodies that it would ever have been without them.

The email I received from Dailymotion included a link to their terms. So I read them. It mentioned that if someone felt that they were the victim of copyright infringement that they had to follow a series of steps including identifying the url of the video in question, explain part of it was copyrighted, and some other stuff.

I’m pretty sure that my video was flagged through the use of this fairly new technique known as video fingerprinting. A whole other issue we could get into is whether these parody videos fall under the protection of a legal term known as “fair use” (which I believe it does).

I decided to challenge the accusation. I sent an email to Dailymotion asking them to provide me with copies of the information that the accuser should have sent to them as per their guidelines. I said that if I determined that the procedure was correctly followed and agreed that the video was a copyright infringement then I would promptly remove it. Otherwise I expected it to be restored immediately.

A few minutes later I received another email asking for the exact url of the video in question. I sent them the requested information. A few minutes after that I received another email saying that the matter was resolved and my video had been restored.

SUCCESS! So now all my Downfall parodies are available to be seen. Here they are for you to see. The first is the original bunker scene and the other 3 are from other parts of the movie. I decided it might be kind of fun to make them into a kind of sitcom called Adolf. Enjoy!

Side note- If you watch part 3 of 3 you might find that it looks vaguely familiar to the Hitler’s a player video. Well that’s because it is. I took a portion of the clip and flipped it. So it’s a mirror image. I think it looks pretty cool.

Hitler’s a player (Downfall movie parody)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 1 of 3)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 2 of 3)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 3 of 3)

What puzzle game would be complete without a crossword puzzle? Not this one, that’s for sure. I knew I wanted to include one but wasn’t sure how I could turn it into something useful. Obviously I had to bury a clue or an answer somewhere but how? There were some obvious choices but finally I had a moment of inspiration and came up with what I thought at the time was a brilliant idea. Looking back on it 3 years later I see it as more lame than brilliant. But still, it is a clever trick if I do say so myself.

The first thing one probably notices upon first looking at the crossword is that the numbering of the boxes is not in order and that one has no number at all. In the clues you see that there is no number 9 but there is a clue with no number. For the most part, that is all a diversion, a red herring as it’s called. My hope was that players would think those were clues and waste time pursuing that assumption.

I also figured that a players first instinct would be to solve the crossword and then use the answers in an attempt to ascertain the puzzle’s solution. So I wanted to do the complete opposite. I decided the solution wouldn’t be contained within the crossword answers at all. It can however, be found in the clues themselves.

I created this puzzle by working backwards. I wanted to continue to have players travel to different websites, like they are on a hunt or an exploration. I wanted the solution to point to an outside website, much like “The Office” and the “Social Network” puzzles. Up to this point I was unsuccessful in finding companies that would pay me to incorporate their website into the game so again I decided to have my own site for players to find. But first, I had to figure out where to send them.

My plan was to use the clue number to point to the letter needed. For example, in clue 3 across, the letter needed is the third one in, the “o” in “Quote”. For 3 down it was the “E” in “SEED”. Each clue containing one letter needed for the answer. Spaces and punctuation were included. Before I decided the answer would be contained within the crossword clues I already had them written down. So instead of starting over I forced some of the clues I had to point to the necessary letter either by changing the clue number or by rewording it. By doing this I established the “.com” part of the answer. For the remaining clues I assigned numbers at random, took the random letters they pointed to, and plugged them into Andy’s Anagram Solver to see if there were any recognizable words. I wasn’t surprised to see that there wasn’t anything useful. So I tried eliminating a letter. Eventually I found the right combination of letters and came up with ITFELT. So the solution to the puzzle became itfelt.com. I was pleased to see that the URL was not already taken so I purchased it for use in the game. I have since let it go and is now dead.

But I had a small problem. I had an answer that was 10 letters (including the period) but the crossword had 11 clues. What I came up with worked out better than I could have possibly imagined at the time. My solution was to just remove the number. This would prove clever not only because of the added confusion it would give the players, but also because it would allow the crossword to be used again later on in what I consider to be my greatest puzzle EVER. You’ll read all about it when we look at Historical Documents.

The part I like best about this puzzle was that it isn’t even necessary to solve the crossword puzzle. The answer lies completely within the clues. I don’t think any player realized this. All of them solved the crossword first. It took 5 days, 7 hours and 8 minutes to solve it and move onto the next one.

I did add the sentence at the top so that players might recognize the answer when they saw it since the web address itself is fairly obscure.

For the redesign, all I did was add the answer blank at the bottom and asked players to just type in the URL instead of going to the website itself since I no longer own it.

You can solve the puzzle by clicking on the Play button below. See if you can solve it yourself. Otherwise you can unhide the solution here:

I like this puzzle because it was my first non-independant puzzle. In other words, this puzzle can’t be solv ed on it’s own. You need something else in order to solve it. In the puzzle “Social Network” there was a lot of misdirection on the site. However, not all of it was intended to fool you. Located among the extraneous material were some pictures.One of them was a picture of a fairly simple maze with the solution already outlined (exactly like the one on the right here). This was what was needed to solve the mystery of the scatter puzzle.

It took longer to solve this puzzle than any other the others in Puzzle Master, a whopping 7 days, 10 hours, and 29 minutes. Most of that time was spent trying figure out if there was any pattern to the data scattered about the puzzle.

I don’t recall how someone eventually figured out that the maze was needed. I believe I had to drop a hint that the scatter puzzle was the lock and they needed a key to unlock it. At some point a player realized that the sizes of the scatter and the maze were the same and if you used a program like MS Paint and pasted one image over the other, the black line solution to the maze ran through a series of letters on the scatter puzzle. Those letters spelled out a question. Once the players figured out the answer to the question, they had the answer to the puzzle as well.

I liked the idea of having a puzzle with seemingly random letters and numbers scattered across a page. I added different colors and symbols to add to the confusion. I also intentionally put some letters close together to add some red herrings to the mix. I knew players would separate the data by colors trying to make some sense of it. I like that it didn’t occur to them until days later and a hint from me that perhaps something else was needed.

In the redesign of this puzzle I added some clues in the sentences at the top. There is one clue in each sentence. The clue in the first sentence is the word “amazingly” referring to the maze. I will leave the second clue for you to figure out but I will tell you that it points to the location of the maze. Or more precisely, where you can find a clue as to its location.

If you can’t figure it out unhind the answer to the maze’s location.
show

If you would like to solve the puzzle yourself click the Play button.
Stumped? Or maybe just want the answer? You can unhide it.
The question:
show

The answer:
show

I love the simplicity of this puzzle. By itself, there is no way that you could solve it. And “by itself” I mean if you were to print the picture out and hand it to someone the answer would elude them forever. This is a perfect internet style puzzle. A fairly decent comprehension of the internet is needed to solve it. Many of the players must have had this level of comprehension because it only took 1 day, 11 hours, and 4 minutes to figure it out. I was hoping players might think this was similar to “The Office” puzzle . This did happen in the beginning but it didn’t take long for someone to see deeper into the puzzle.

In the original game play there was no sentence at the top of the puzzle to shed some light on what you were looking for. It was interesting to watch some players spend time determining that the building was the Watergate Hotel. To be honest, I had no idea what hotel it was and as they would soon learn, it doesn’t matter. Just the fact that it was a hotel is all that’s important. One player noted that the balconies at the top looked like bars similar to those in the AT&T wireless commercials that were going on then so time was wasted trying to establish some kind of mathematical relationship between the balconies and applying it to the Watergate scandal in some way. All useless directions.

It wasn’t until someone realized the the picture’s file name was 1.jpg that the ball started rolling and suddenly other images were discovered. They were found by changing the 1.jpg to 2.jpg and then 3.jpg, and so on. Soon the players had eight images to work with.

I’m not sure who came up with it first but one person said he realized the connection between the pictures when he was communicating his drivers license number to someone over the phone. For the letters he used the phonetic alphabet. That’s when it hit him. Once that clue was discovered the puzzle was quickly solved. It was a little tricky figuring out which phonetic letter some of the pictures represented but either they were eventually determined or they had enough letters figured out to be able to guess the rest. A quick check over at Andy’s Anagram Solver (Google it, it’s a great tool for puzzle solving) produced the correct answer.

Now that you know how to get to the images, see if you can solve it the rest of the way. When you think you have the answer, type it into the answer blank at the bottom of the puzzle page and see if you’re right.

If you’re stumped you can unhide the answer here:

Next up in our review and breakdown of previous Cluechaser puzzles is the one titled Good Luck. Hands down this puzzle was the most confusing for players. The difficult part it seems was not coming up with the pieces you needed to solve the puzzle but rather in putting them together in the right order and understanding what they meant. Although it only took 2 days, 17 hours and 17 minutes solve no other puzzle has generated more discussion on the message board than this one.

The original puzzle differs slightly from the one you see now. It had two directions. During the redesign I changed the answer into something less obscure but to do so I had to add another directional arrow so now there are three.

It didn’t take long for the majority of the players to figure out that you had to click on the pictures of the thermometer, feet, and ruler to get to the meat of the puzzle. There they realized that irritating and frustrating math problems awaited them. The math wasn’t particularly difficult but I tried to make it as confusing as possible. I knew most people would just copy and past the numbers into a spreadsheet so I made them bitmaps instead. Players were forced to read the numbers and enter them by hand into something. I’m sure it was the cause of many incorrect answers due to fat fingered data entry errors.
A funny side-note, one player didn’t realize you needed to click on the pictures so they were trying to translate the read-out on the thermometer, the 2 feet, and the distance on the ruler into something. I believe that a friendly hint from a fellow player got that person back on the right track.

Once players came up with the answers to the math problems it was pretty obvious that the purpose of the color coding was to put all the answers together by color. Not too much time after that someone mentioned that feet and inches is another way to represent minutes and seconds of latitude and longitude coordinates. From there it was just a matter of plugging these coordinates into Google Maps or Google Earth and seeing what was there.

Players quickly understood that the image they zoomed into at each of the coordinates was a building that was shaped like a letter. Soon the players had the 5 letters they needed. But now what? That proved to be the most difficult question to answer.

One thing I like about this puzzle is the multiple steps needed to get to the answer. There was quite a lot of work involved. I think the reason it was so hard to come up with the answer is that aside form the letter shaped buildings, there was no other clue as to what the answer was. Had I been a player, I would have immediately recognized what they represented and solved it right away. I find it interesting that no one came up with it on their own. I had to give A LOT of hints on the message board to nudge people in the right direction. I didn’t like having to do that and have since designed puzzles with enough clues in them that they can be solved without hints from me. This however, makes the puzzles easier to solve and that’s why Cluechaser games now take 3 or 4 days to finish instead of 31 days.

Eventually, after many hints, someone finally figured it out and then dropped a couple hints of their own on the message board and so after more than 7 days of chipping away at it, the puzzle was solved and most of the players were onto the next one.

What was the answer? Well, the letters indicated by the building shapes were E, I, O, X, and Y. I was hoping that players might recognize that the letters were an English alphabet representations of similar looking Greek letters. Realizing that I thought they might come up with IXOYE which is something I have seen on many bumper stickers and vanity plates and it represents JESUS, which was the correct answer. No one got that on their own although one player said that he unknowingly said the answer out loud when he first saw the math problems. I thought that was pretty funny.

For the redesigned version of the puzzle, the answer is much easier to figure out and the sentence at the top gives a pretty good clue to assist you.

Challenge yourself. Solve the math problems to find the coordinates, plug them into Google Maps (or Earth), see the alphabet shaped buildings and take a stab at the answer by typing it in the answer blank at the bottom.

If you get stuck or just want the answer you can unhide it here:

However, in order to get there from here, I have to finish game 3. So I am picking up where I left off. I am determined to finish this game and get it out to you to play. I am about 60% done. If I can focus on it for a couple weeks I should be able to finish it. When it is about 90% done I will have an idea of when the start date will be.

So please be patient dear Cluechaser fan. The end of the journey is approaching. Once game 3 is done there will be no more Cluechaser games like this, but Cluechaser will continue on in a different format. One I hope you will find interesting. Will there be puzzles? Of course there will. I love making them so I won’t stop doing that. The contests will likely end though. They just take too much out of me.

So thank you for your patience. I will let you know more soon.

Take care.
Cowpatty Bill