Favorite Puzzles

[l33tminion]

I should have mentioned in that last post my favorite puzzles of this year's Hunt:
Parts of Speech
Unlikely Situations
Mario Clash

A lot of Hunt puzzles have the following form: Figure out the structure, solve the puzzle, extract an answer. Personally, I prefer puzzles that concentrate difficulty in the middle step and have a little cleverness in the first. Incredibly frustrating to solve a puzzle and be unable to solve the solution.

Parts of Speech is hard (but straightforward) once you figure out the structure (not hard, but creative). Unlikely Situations is relatively easy once you figure out the structure, which may be easy or difficult (but is probably easy for most Hunters). Mario Clash is easy once you figure out the structure (which there are many, many clues for; this one should have been easy but no one on my team got it). Extracting the answer is easy for all of those.

Comments

[tenshikurai9.livejournal.com]

A few people on my team thought Mario Clash was too hard for the beginning and should have been later-on in the hunt somehow.

[l33tminion]

I don't think it was hard. I even referred to it as the "excessively 3D puzzle" (the "Magic Eye" image, "Mario Clash" is a Virtual Boy game) and expected that you had to do something with the RGB values (straightforward if you read the Magic Eye, which I can't but my team members did). I only missed it because I was too brain-fogged to put two and two together. The remaining two steps of the puzzle (do the work, extract the answer) were pretty trivial for that one.