As we close in on the final puzzles of Game 1: The Missing Mr. E we now turn our attention to puzzle #8, the Crossword puzzle. I enjoyed making and having a crossword puzzle so much in the previous game Puzzle Master that I brought it back again. I sort of hoped that players might think it employed the same trick as last time in that the answer to the puzzle was in the clues themselves and finishing the crossword was unnecessary. Alas, I don’t think anyone fell for that.

The players got to the puzzle by clicking on the book labeled “Puzzles” located in the book shelf behind the desk in the office picture.

The puzzle is simple enough. Find the answers to the clues and plug them into the crossword. Some of the squares contained diamonds and some circles. Unscramble the circled letters to get one solution and the diamonds to get another.
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There are times when I don’t really enjoy working on the Cluechaser site. It takes a lot of time and energy to keep it updated and each blog post usually takes me several hours to put together. I don’t mind doing this but then I look at the amount of visitors the site gets and it discourages me. It is quite dismal. I never expected to get famous doing this but I had hoped it would be a more popular site.

Then there are days when I absolutely love what I do. Today is one of those days and let me tell you why.
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Update: I originally posted this as Ultimate Puzzle #4 but after thinking about it for a few days I realized that it’s in the wrong spot. Although a puzzle for me I think that the majority of you wouldn’t agree. Therefor I feel it is right to move it under the regular blog section. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog reading….

Today I was reading an article about the blu-ray release of the Star Wars saga. I am a fan of the Star Wars movies but I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with it or anything like that. I have yet to own a blu-ray player so news of this release didn’t fill me with any particular excitement. Especially since there is talk of some more changes that George Lucas has made that seems to have the Star Wars fans in an uproar. You can read more about that in this article.
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I couldn’t remember how complex this puzzle was so I had to go back and solve it again before I could write this blog post. I knew that I had inserted some trickery into it but I couldn’t recall exactly what it was. I could have read my notes but sometimes I make last minute changes to puzzles and forget to update my notes. This is the type of puzzle that I would have done this with. So the only solution was to solve it. It took some time but I figured it out.
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I must admit that sometimes I amaze even myself with what I can create. Game 1 was played back in early 2008, over 3 years ago now. Some of the puzzles, this one in particular, haven’t been looked at by me since then. Due to the complexity of it’s design I never posted it on the website as a puzzle for anyone to solve. As I look at it now in preparation for this review I wonder how it was that I came up with it. As it turns out, with the third quickest solve time of 1 hour and 31 minutes, it wasn’t a difficult puzzle but the sheer variety of puzzle types I used to create this leads me to believe that I must have been in a particularly creative mood when I designed it.

Truthfully, I’ve haven’t been looking forward to this review. Its kind of like when you had a party the evening before and left all the cleanup for the next day. You wake up in the morning, crawl out of bed and as you head toward the living room (ground zero) you have this feeling of dread wash over you. You wished you would have just stayed up later to clean because now everything has been sitting out all night and things have been broken and you’re not sure how to fix them. You survey the room, see the extent of the cleanup job, and suddenly have the inexplicable urge to turn and just run out the door and never look back. This puzzle is like that in the sense that it has many pieces and most of them weren’t kept together after the game ended so it has taken a lot of work to gather it all up again.
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Back in the Puzzle Master game I had a puzzle that included a fake newspaper called the ClueChaser Intelligencer. I like the idea of newspaper puzzles a lot so I brought it back again for The Missing Mr. E. Unfortunately of all the puzzles I’ve created this is one of my least favorites. It just looks sloppy and cheap to me.
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If you look closely at the office picture, which is the access point for all the puzzles in The Missing Mr. E game, you will see the large lamp on the far left side. Above that lamp, scrawled into the wood frame around the window is the phrase “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT”. This is where the players found the link the fourth puzzle.

I call it The Matrix.
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Puzzle 3. Just like in Puzzle Master, the third turned out to be the most difficult. Looking back on it now I can see why. This didn’t seem that complicated when I first created it but I got lost myself when I reviewed my notes in preparation for this blog entry. Let me see if I can break it down piece by piece so you have a clear understanding of how it was put together.
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I love movies. A lot. I even like commercials when they’re humorous and original. One of my favorite places in the world to be is sitting in the middle seat of the middle row of a large darkened movie theater. I get excited when the lights dim and previews begin. I remember when I was young my friend Steve once went to the movies with me “just to see the previews”. At the time I thought to myself how strange it was to spend 3 bucks (or whatever it cost back then) to watch previews and not really care about the actual movie playing. Now I understand why. Previews get you excited about what’s coming. You get that sneak peak at whatever tale of adventure or intrigue or action or comedy will soon be playing out before your eyes. Assuming of course that it’s a movie that you WANT to see. So far I’m a pretty good judge of whether a movie will be any good based solely from the preview. I’ve only been wrong a couple times. And I rarely read reviews because I typically don’t agree with what a critic has to say about a particular film.

I even like to play a little game while I’m sitting there.
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The ClueChaser logo that I created a few years ago is both sad looking and kind of boring. So I decided to change it. Well sort of. I am still working on a new logo but in the mean time I have a new design for t-shirts and other ClueChaser apparel. This new design is based off something created for ClueChaser by Trillustrations and it looks pretty good on a t-shirt.

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.