Tag: countdown

Deus City Countdown

September 24, 2006 / Larry Eisner

No, it’s not another Top 40 list from some radio station in Deus City! It’s a new countdown started at the main page at Deus City! Currently the countdown is set to expire on November 11th (if my math is correct), and what will happen at that time is anyone’s guess! As reported earlier, the game isn’t scheduled to launch until 2007, so expect ARGN to be on the case, reporting anything new that happens on that date!

In the meantime, don’t forget that you can submit your own puzzles to be used in the game, by contacting Adam Brackin, and you’ll get the details, and the required API for submissions.

In other Deus News, the Deus City Blog has been updated, including some strange hybrids of science, prophecy, and homebrew time/space theory. It’s worth a read, and quite entertaining, as well as head-‘splody goodness. In a nutshell, the author of the blog proposes we can communicate with the past and the future, although the exact nature of communicating with the past (which therefore allows communication with the future, for those in the past, receiving that communication), is not yet given in detail.

Essentially, the future is now. So that makes it the present. But since that already happened, it’s the past. Whew…. Anyway, once you get your head around this stuff (at least enough to not re-read everything four times like this writer) you get a feel for where this game is headed. The concepts are fun and well thought-out, and the story for the game, while obviously not entirely in plain sight yet, are prime for game-time.

I personally look forward to playing this game, and always enjoy good immersive pre-game, even if that game’s launch is quite some time in the future. As always, continue to look to ARGN for news on this and other Alternate Reality Games in the future. The Future. Yeah, I’ll just keep on saying that…in the future.

Not For Noobs … Is It…?

August 22, 2006 / Brooke Thompson

5…4…3…6…0…

Yep, that’s right, another mysterious countdown has appeared and this one might just have something to do with a certain gaming console. NotForNoobs.com first appeared last week and savvy gamers will recognize the logo that appears as that of Razer, a company that makes gaming peripherals (that’d be controllers and mice and the like for you non-gamers and computer geeks out there). The signs linking it to the xbox are somewhat weak, but with a few logical leaps, it’s easy to get there. For example, an earlier version of the flash had Microsoft on Channel 1. And, the day that Gizmodo first mentioned NotForNoobs.com, Microsoft hinted at a new optional advanced controller that would perform better when making precise movements.

So, why is ARGN talking about this? Is there an ARG? OMG NOWAI ILB2!?! Let’s not get excited. It’s just a countdown with no other information. It may just end with a redirect to a press announcement for all we know. But, we do know that you all like to go crazy with the spec and watching countdowns count down is oh so much fun!

5…4…wheeeeee…6….oh

Follow up 8/23/06 : As the countdown came to an end, gamers everywhere let out a collective “oh.” as they received pictures of a shiny new gaming mouse, the Microsoft Habu, and a press release that detailed some of the unique features. How did we know that’s all we’d get? Such a waste of a good countdown, too. And, as if that wasn’t disappointing enough, the real wait has just begun. If you’re interested in this low sensitivity mouse with an advanced sensor that promises virtually no latency with the speed of a wired mouse and the feel of a wireless device, don’t go heading out to your favorite store today because you aren’t going to get your hands on the Habu until October.

Zoom In On Ocular Effect

July 10, 2006 / Jackie Kerr

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.

Eon8 Activate!

June 30, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

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”:

Another Mysterious Countdown

October 15, 2005 / Jonathan Waite

News articles at Team XBox and GameSpot (scroll down to Rumor #2), as well as an anonymous tip to ARGN, have led us to The Lutz World Report, a self-proclaimed “‘truth’ source of the Paranormal and Extraordinary.” But wait — what is that there? Is that… a countdown timer? Counting down to… sometime on October 18th? What could it all mean???

We all know how important countdown timers are in the world of Alternate Reality Gaming — who could forget the launches of I Love Bees and Metacortechs? At the same time, one shouldn’t forget non-ARGs like Our Colony and OrigenXBox360. The moral of the story, as it always is, is to wait and see. We’ll be watching to see what happens on Tuesday with cautious optimism.

Tag: countdown

Deus City Countdown

Not For Noobs … Is It…?

Zoom In On Ocular Effect

Eon8 Activate!

Another Mysterious Countdown

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