Studio Cypher has announced the launch of their second “Multiplayer Novel,” entitled Perfect Friends Forever, set to begin this week. According to Studio Cypher, “[Perfect Friends Forever] is much improved on our first episode: it contains many more puzzles and major story updates will happen on Tuesdays and Fridays.” The plot will involve Madame Z, a psychic who uses spirits to run a matchmaking service, who is trying to find out which of her spirit helpers has turned against her. For a free preview, enter the pass code “argonaut” at the Perfect Friends Forever trailhead site.
Category: News (Page 136 of 183)
Good news comes to Perplex City fans this week as Perplex City announces that their card packs are now available via several major online retailers. The card packs, as well as a starter pack which includes additional items such as a music CD and a binder, may now be purchased at Overstock.com, Buy.com, Walmart.com, and Toys “R” Us.
Mind Candy received recognition recently at the Origins International Game Expo, where they won the Vanguard Innovative Game Award. According to the Origins Expo website, Origins awards “Celebrate the best in board, role-playing, miniatures, play-by-mail, and trading card games; professional and amateur magazine publications, game-related fiction, and accessories and supplements.”
Last but not least, Perplex City is planning a live event in San Francisco on August 12, from 10:30 am until 5:00 pm. According to Mind Candy, this is their first major US event, and they hope to have several hundred people there. This event will “activate the link” between Perplex City and San Francisco. For more information or to register, visit the live event website at PerplexCity.com.
The ARGN Tipline lightbulb flashed this morning, alerting us to a new message arriving at the ARGcave. Our intrepid hero reporters donned their shiny gold catsuits and red swirlie over-the-suit panties, flipped their capes over their shoulders and flew into the internet wild to gather information, like the Thunderbirds but with better marionettes.
They came back with a mysterious website, Ocular Effect. The rather barren site displays a flash movie entitled “spiroclock” – but wait! Is that what we think it is?! IT’S A COUNTDOWN! We hooked Brains up to his new fangled math program and he chugged out an answer – Monday! The countdown clock runs to this upcoming Monday, July 17th! Holy good mathing, Brains!
We then sent Virgil Tracy out to whois the domain. He was amazingly successful and Lady Penelope was most enthused. Virgil gathered intriguing information that leads the ARGNbirds to believe that the magical world of Disney is behind this project. Gordon, not wanting to be out-performed by that pantywaist Virgil, noticed in his investigation that Ocular Effects redirects to 00112358.net, which isn’t registered to Disney, oddly enough.
What may happen on Monday has yet to be discovered — it’s unclear what Disney project is being promoted, and equally hazy what the strange, spinning wheel with the ooglie-booglie, danger music represents, but rest assured, the ARGNbirds are ready, prepped, and pantied to keep you informed of every surprise.
When something pops up on the radar with enough force to bog down an entire message forum, we generally sit up and take notice. Today, eon8 is the web site that is shaking the ARG world, and it has a familiar feeling to it. If you are lucky enough to be able to access the site (traffic jams are just as nasty on the Internet as in real life, I guess) you will notice the countdown (currently at 0d:01h:30m:37s) as well as a Project Status (currently X13600 Imminent, whatever that means). A link to deployment logs reveals a lot of alphanumeric strings, while the Deployment Tracker is a lovely little link… that I can’t seem to access, yet. Many of the links on the front page go to a password-protected subdomain as well, evidence that this may indeed turn into an ARG.
All of that aside, this is another occasion where it’s not entirely certain what this site has in store, but with the amount of attention it has received so far, we’ll keep an eye out and update when we find out what the X13600 is going on.
:: Discussion at Unfiction forums (connection may be slow due to high volume of traffic)
Update!
So, as it turns out, the entire thing was a social experiment. At 12:00 AM EST, the site reloaded. These are excerpts of the text from the eon8.com site, under a link called “Reveal The Truth”:
Sometimes, ARG doesn’t mean alternate reality gaming. Sometimes, ARG means ARRRRRG, the bellow from the pit of the pirate’s stomach that sends scurvy dogs runnin’ and strikes fear in the hearts of the fisherman who sail the… alright, so our piratespeak isn’t very good. In any event, Dead Man’s Tale has led us to raise the Jolly Roger and lose ourselves in the world of Billy Bones, through the magic of Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger software. A promotion for the upcoming movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the IM-based game allows you to add Billy as a friend, and starting a conversation with the skeletal character moves you further into the story with text scripts and fun games and puzzles that load within the messenger window. One of the interesting elements of this game is the ability to pair up with a friend and tackle the various challenges together, while an accompanying MSN Spaces site holds important information which ties in with the messenger experience.
Normally, we wouldn’t obsess over a pirate-themed messenger interactive experience, but this one has a special connection to the ARG universe. We received a rumor that this might be another venture by the creative forces at 42 Entertainment, a theory which we think we’ve proven to be true by looking at Billy’s MSN profile. Of course, we might just be wrong on this, but coincidences are rare these days, and bee keeping seems an odd interest for those in the pillaging and plundering profession. Even with the connection to 42, there is no indication that this is the beginning of any alternate reality game campaign, but based on initial game play, it’s a fun way to add marketing hype to the Disney blockbuster set to hit theaters on July 7. So, grab your swords and log into the world of Bones and his swashbuckling hi-jinks.
Editor’s Note: We found this link a few minutes ago, so our suspicions were right. Yarr.
One month ago, we were happy to send out a Game Alert about Catching The Wish, the sequel to the 2003 alternate reality game Chasing The Wish. In the weeks since that announcement, the game has exploded onto computer screens everywhere with multiple websites, a rich and engrossing storyline, and interactivity that has added layer upon layer of immersive game play for the players following the story of Dale Sprague and his life-changing wish. The ARG is also tied in with Chasing The Wish: Book One, the first in a series of four comic books based on the storyline originally created by Dave Szulborski, who designed the first CTW and has since worked on projects like Art of the Heist and Who Is Benjamin Stove.
I was lucky enough to get a copy of the comic book last month, and even though I am not necessarily a fan of comics, the writing and artistic design were enough to keep me turning pages. With a script written by Jason Stackhouse, art by P. Emerson Williams and Jessica Kaos, and an overall creative vision by James Curcio, the comic is visually entertaining while delivering a concise and thrilling story. Book One is available through online venues, such as Indyplanet and New Fiction Publishing.
black watchmen
generation loss
undertone
curators request
simulacra
meow wolf