So, there's this company named Google. You might have heard of them. One day this company has a meeting. The big boss guy stands up at the front and says: "People... we are obviously crushing the competition in the fields of searching, mailing, mapping, translating, and plussing. Now... we did drop the ball on "waving", but we all agreed never to speak of that again. What we really need now is an html5 puzzle game to highlight our achievements. Also, we need it to be completely friggin' insane. Because of that, we're outsourcing development to the Japanese puzzle-smiths at SCRAP." And so, from that simple brainstorming session came great things: The Google Puzzle... and it's ready to wreck a desktop near you.
The Google Puzzle has a simple plot: the Google logo has lost its "o", and, not wanting to spend the rest of its life as "Go gle" it needs your help to track it down. Doing so will require intelligence, intuition, and the convenient featuring of Google's most popular products. The game begins with five riddles to solve, each requiring a typed one word answer. These solutions are then combined in a final puzzle whose completion will reunite o and Go_gle and grant you the right to inscribe your name in the Google Hall of Fame.
Artistic, hyperactive, and more than a little draining on the CPU, The Google Puzzle leaves no programming trick untried and no brick in the fourth wall un-demolished. The solutions of The Google Puzzle are generally easy to determine, but require a certain brand of lateral thinking you will find either brilliant or annoying. This is a undoubtedly busy game with windows popping open and shut, animations dancing, music blaring, and scripts running. Eclectic is a good word for it, and, like many eclectic things, it's likely The Google Puzzle will divide opinion. That said, there are some really clever ideas at play, and it's always interesting to see how and when a developer is able to integrate non-gaming applications into the fun. Even if The Google Puzzle's flash outweighs its substance, it's does pretty well with both.
Note: The Google Puzzle has been developed and optimized for the Google Chrome browser. In practice, the game seems to be reasonably playable on other browsers, though the nature of the game may make for some apparently weird behavior.
Walkthrough Guide
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The Google Puzzle Walkthrough
Puzzle One
With six Google Map locations, you're looking for a six letter answer.
Try switching the view from "map" to "satellite".
The shapes of the buildings spell out the answer: GLOBAL
Puzzle Two
Start by translating each of the phrases into English.
In order, the languages used are: Slovak, Malay, Hindi, Chinese, Russian, Korean and English... though you could just use the "Detect Language" feature :).
Now, look for the country at the start...
The first letter of each word spells out the answer: IRELAND
Puzzle Three
Like it says: Big -> Small
Click on the animals in order of biggest to smallest
Elephant, Horse, Pig, Dog, Duck.
Each animal links to a specific letter in the video. This spells the answer HEART.
Puzzle Four
Make things 5X5.
Reshape the window so that the letters appear in a 5X5 grid.
Read them out vertically.
"Who is man's best friend?"
The answer is, of course, DOG.
Puzzle Five
You have to determine who it is by the events on their calendar.
Note the date: January 1787
And the gmail address: [email protected]. Could those be initials?
His calendar has a lot of composing and performances of Figaro
The answer is MOZART.
Take me to the ticking.
Take the cursor to the ticking...
By dragging the blown-up picture of a mouse pointer over to the on-screen timer!
The Google Cube
Now's the time to recall that shape from the loading screen.
It's in the window marked "?".
Dragging the picture of the shape over the cube will make the hint explicit.
"Bridge the o and o."
You'll need to think outside the box for this one... and in the address bar.
Go from the page to www.thegobridgeoglepuzzle.com... and enjoy the ending!
Posted by: Tricky
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September 17, 2011 12:36 PM