Chinese Puzzle Torture

By Shamus Posted Saturday Aug 26, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 13 comments

Looks like I’m not the only one puzzleblogging today. Steven links to this insidious game. The first five puzzles are minor speed bumps, and as Steven points out, the sixth one is a wall. A wall five meters tall, utterly smooth, and crowned with barbed wire. I’d think it was impossible but Steven has already done it. Now the puzzle taunts me.

The fact that the directions are in Chinese should not deter you. It’s pretty much intuitive. Besides, I’m pretty sure that characters just say, “HA HA! You never solve this one, round-eye!”

 


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13 thoughts on “Chinese Puzzle Torture

  1. HC says:

    Enjoy the taunting. It gets harder afterward. :)

  2. Actually, puzzles 7-11 weren’t too bad. But now I’m really seriously stuck on puzzle 12.

    Once I found the solution to puzzle 6, I sat back and chuckled at the sheer cleverness of the game designer. He’s a good one.

  3. Will says:

    I’m stuck at 12 now as well. For some reason, I completely tripped up on 5 and 7 (I think, should have kept track).

  4. Will says:

    Well I got past 12 and made it to 15 before getting completely stuck again. Don’t worry about me spoiling things. I’ve buried all the solutions without previews.

  5. Michael Davis says:

    I just finished puzzle 17, which has been the worst by far. I stumbled upon the trick to solve it purely by accident, and even then it still took some time to figure out how to apply it correctly. They definitely seem to start getting really nasty around 14 or 15.

    Interestingly, it hasn’t stopped adding new piece types yet. I think #15 adds color filters, and #18 just introduced a prism.

  6. HC says:

    25 in all. And he apparently desires to mess with your head on the last one. 10 was the worst for me, and some of the ones with prisms are really neat.

    He seems to give you a few warm-up puzzles every time he introduces a new element, so surges and stops are the way it goes.

  7. Michael Davis says:

    22 was probably the worst for me. Of course, that was the one I was working on when I suddenly noticed that it was after 2:00 AM, and I’d been working on these things for hours.

    After a little sleep, I finally got it, and the last three were pretty simple by comparison.

  8. Michael Davis says:

    Okay, this is just not fair. I searched around a bit, and apparently there’s a second set of puzzles by the same author numbered 26-50. I just started on them. 26 introduces another new piece (a beam splitter) that has some really weird interactions with the color changer piece introduced in 23.

    Assuming I did this right, here’s a link to where I found it.

  9. HC says:

    Thanks for the additional ones – and yeah, the beam splitter and color changers are almost incomprehensible.

  10. Robin says:

    (Clue follows, so shield your eyes if you don’t want this…) The prism makes more sense once you realize that each color behaves differently, but predictably, as it passes through. So, if you need to produce a white line, the trick is to get all three color beams entering the prism at the correct orientation to produce a single emerging line — which, as a combination of the three, will be white. Once you know this, the prism puzzles are much easier to attack. The color changers seem quite simple by comparison, but I suspect they will get nastier in the new set (as though I have more time to spend on this!).
    I worked my way through all 25 in about two or three hours. I must have gotten lucky with no. 6, as it only took about five minutes. But I agree 22 was a killer. And I’m really not sure what’s up with 12. I think I sussed the trick (and it’s an elegant one) but still could not hit all the stars with the given reflectors. Nevertheless, the puzzle claimed I’d solved it and moved me forward, so perhaps something there is broken.

  11. (Yeah, I was browsing the archives…)

    This looks to be an unlicensed rip-off of Silver Spaceship Software’s Chromatron game; if you want more, get it from the real source :-)

  12. HopefulFlame. says:

    I got stuck on twelve and am now mildly stuck on seventeen. But I didn’t really have trouble until I got to nine.

  13. trrrrble says:

    your friend steven say’s he doesn’t like deep linking (link now goes to a lovely image that says so)

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