Ok, fine, I'll post about the event.
Now you'll find out why I didn't post yesterday, even though we skipped the awards ceremony
and got home early. My mood hasn't improved much...
It was f'n hot. Like, seriously. And I swear, we did that walk to Paradise Pier in the bloody sunniest part of the sunniest park in the hottest part of the day at least 6 times. HOT. We had frozen our brand new camelback but alas, it is such a well-insulated pack that the ice refused to melt fast enough, and would block any actual water from coming out the tube. We had to resort to adding drinking fountain water to keep us alive.
I swear, halfway though the day, we were looking at each other and saying "is this even fun anymore??" I felt ready to YAGE from the event forever, and that's never quite happened to me so strongly before.
Ok, enough introductory complaining, now on to the rest of the complaining.
The Mystery concept was a cool idea, actually. There were 6 crime dossiers we were given one at a time. Each dossier contained 3 different puzzles to solve. In Disneyland we were allowed to separate to work on different puzzles which was fun though the concept of being divided without being able to call each other kind of freaked me out. I don't even wear a watch, so we couldn't set a meet time either. Thankfully we both wore recognizable hats so it wasn't an issue.
After you solved the three crime puzzles you handed it in and got one of the 6 mystery components to solve. It required parts of info from the three puzzles to solve it. If you skipped small bits of your crimes you could be in trouble.
Once again we found ourselves doing a ton of work and then, due to one missing component, getting the answer wrong. Still not a fan of this concept. Other teams said the same afterwards. Oddly, I think we did pretty well on the major questions as we were able to backtrack and get answers, but I'm really not sure (not ready to hit MousePad yet). All that backtracking didn't help our mood, though.
There were a couple of construction wall problems and they dealt with them in interesting ways. One was an errata sheet, which gave the answer in a storyline way, which worked fine (once someone told me to check the errata sheet. Yup, I still miss stuff). The other was to add an extra sheet to the actual puzzle, but in reading it, we were totally confused. It seemed to give us the answer in a roundabout way, but it didn't quite come across well enough. We were confused as it seemed we didn't have to do any work. Even so, I think we got that one wrong. Confusing!
Oh, and I have to say, the wording on some of these was awful when it came to exactly what kind of answer they were looking for - a character, a location, what? We have finally mastered reading everything but now it was "read everything - 4 times - and debate the meaning."
There were some puzzles that were mostly easy, and some that did have a satisfying moment where you look for the 3rd time and find the hidden sign (Shrunken Ned's "Medical Advice", woo!). For example, the mural at Mulholland Madness had nothing on previous mural challenges. But then there was the license plates in Condor Flats, yeech. I can't wait to see what the hell that was about. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to us. We made a mostly blind stab guess which didn't make much sense. These "logic puzzles" aren't really logic puzzles.
There were some fun gimmicks. I did the yellow grid over the course of the day. It was the best use of my sharpie ever at an MA, as a pen or pencil wouldn't work too well on plastic. I thought I was missing something, had the awesome a-ha moment, and got it right. Yay. Same was true for the red sheet, Miley Cyrus' bday. I got to do a few of these major questions and those were pretty cool. We got the "plans for the DCA expansion" at the very last minute. If we only had time to get them all done...
But seriously, a lot of the minor questions had us frustrated and backtracking and grumbling. However, like any MA, we saw things that we've never seen before at DL. The posters on the ceiling of the pin shop in NOS was my favorite.
Why could we separate at DL, where everything is close together, but not at DCA, where everything is far away and being separate would be useful?
Anyway, I'm not YAGEing from MA yet, but I will say that I really don't want to do another afternoon at DCA. Thing is, we never know which park is at what time of day when we register. So maybe I'm just too old and cranky for this crap anymore? Maybe I've done it enough times. I don't know. The prospect of a freakin' Enchanted Race is not very enticing right now, even though we can actually compete in it, because it just doesn't sound fun.
Anyway, since iSm didn't make it, I guess I had to fill in the curmudgeon role.
