MouseAdventure

[BarTopDancer]

My team had a blast. And for the first time in my 10 or so MouseAdventures, we finished!

It wasn't nearly as evil as the last Invitational; we could all walk after.

More later. Bed now.

[innerSpaceman]

I will not be playing the Invitational again. I don't like the concept at all. First of all, I despise the Mad Scramble format of all or nothing, either you have this one particular skill or you lose. I think, frankly, the whole thing is devised to make the scoring easier on the staff, and I call shenanigans on that for making it less fun for the participants (imo).

As for the Invitational in particular ... I think the object of making it more difficult is poorly executed. More difficult in terms of puzzlier puzzles, constant puzzles for every frelling little thing, even poorer instructions than usual or none at all .... It's all a reliance on puzzle excellence and not - as I would think more appropriate - - a reliance on DISNEYLAND excellence.


I simply prefer the stuff that tests and expands your knowledge of the parks and the resort, attention to beautiful detail - - and, most important, discovery of detail and use of the Parks for expanded levels of playfulness.

I applaud the Invitational scheme for requiring players to experience actual attractions ... but otherwise I felt it was too short on the elements that made me a mouseadventure fanatic.


Plus, I'll have to admit ... maybe I'm even a little burnt out. (although, the last game ... a Mad Scramble at that ... was intensely fun. So I think I'm perfectly capable of thoroughly enjoying a game that has my desired playfulness and discovery aspects.)


I'm going into semi retirement. I won't be playing any future Invitationals or Mad Scrambles, but I'll happily participate in good old MouseAdventure Classic when and if it happens to come around.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

although, the last game ... a Mad Scramble at that ... was intensely fun.
<snip>
I won't be playing any future Invitationals or Mad Scrambles...

Huh? I know you love saying "bah", but this seems a bit contradictory, at best.

I have to admit, this was not a fun game for us for one big portion of it. The first quest on Main Street we simply couldn't get right, and we're still not sure what we had wrong, as we just fudged an answer. This lead to the second quest's answers so we were stuck there too for a while till we could make some sense of the chart and make a guess. Then we hit the Buzz quest which was fun to begin with but ended up our downfall...

Since we never use the lockers on Main Street we were absolutely stuck, to the point of taking 1 hour in penalties, not to mention all the time we spent wandering around trying to find it. That was not fun - it was totally demoralizing to have to go first ask for advice and then simply give up and get a pass - both of which we never, ever do. And then, of course, it's obvious, right in front of our faces, but we never would have thought of it.

Thankfully, we were able to shake off the blues enough to enjoy the rest of the nifty quests, many of which were in DCA. I know the compass caused others some pain but for us it wasn't bad and allowed us to actually use good park knowledge, such as using the park map to find phones, and my immediate recall of the Nescafe billboard. The ears puzzle had us puzzled a while which was a bit of a downer until I finally went "Lend me your ears! YOUR EARS!!" as I grabbed GD's mouseeared head. On the Sun Wheel GD had that great A-ha while noticing the umbrella blooms. I love those golden MA moments and there were plenty of those to go around.

It seemed everyone was spread out so thin it was very hard to figure out where we stood. Of course when we did poorly we thought everyone was ahead of us, and something about the layout of the game made it hard to tell when we passed people. In any case, after our stumble on Main Street we barely saw anyone.

At the very end we handed in our clock times and decided to give it the ol' gas to get to the last station (after not really rushing due to feeling like we were totally out of contention) and in doing so we passed a team to the finish, as they had to stop and get a park map, having lost theirs. THAT felt good. Though I think they got 2nd place anyway....

We didn't stick around long enough to get scores so we'll have to wait until Wednesday. In the end I'm an MA addict and I just love too much about the game to get bummed by the tough parts. And we finished!!! We'll be back, always.

I'd love to hear what people thought of the Open, it was fun to test.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Well, I can still walk!

Sadly, we were undone by one simple fact...we NEVER get lockers. And thus, presented with a drawing of a pile of suitcases to find, the Main Street lockers never ocurred to us. Even after taking a 20 minute penalty to get hints (which informed us that it was on Main Street, not an attraction, and inside), we walked into every single open door on Main Street EXCEPT the lockers. And when we were forced to then take a second, 40 minute, penalty to skip the quest, we had a gut-wrenching, head-slapping moment the second they said, "It's a locker combination." Once they said that, the image of those lockers jumped into my head, clear as day. AAARGH!

So yeah, 60 minutes of penalties plus the wasted time wandering around in vain. At that point, we felt utterly defeated. And, idiotically, we failed to remember our lesson from the last Invitational...even if we feel like we're doing terribly, odds are that means other people are as well. Had we kept our pace up, even after that, we learned that we may have still been in contention. As it was, we eventually switched our goal to "just FINISH", which we did, and in what turned out to be a respectible time.

I thought there was a lot of fun stuff. From having to spot the Zip-a-Dee poster on the Splash river boat while on the train, to spying 3 "blooms" (brightly colored umbrellas scattered about DCA by the staff) from atop the Sunwheel, to my crash course on how to use a compass, I thought there was a lot of clever stuff. Though, having beta tested the open game, I liked some of those quests better.

HUGE congrats to all the others that finished. Hell, to anyone who even attempted. Damn we're a bunch of masochists.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Sadly, we were undone by one simple fact...we NEVER get lockers.

Heheh, and we were undone by my teammate's intense magnetic field which causes compasses to spin wildly out of control and never point north. Whatever. It's the fact that one shortfall in one area spells doom. I hate it.

Although, and just my personal preference here, I'd rather the reliance on Park knowledge (i.e. lockers) be a singular factor than the reliance on skills that don't have anything to do with Disneyland.




Just to be clear, I'm not grumbling because we lost. It's clear that my championship days are far behind me. I'm grumbling because it wasn't fun for me. Hahaha, the lockers / Buzz quest was the only thing I enjoyed. It's all a matter of taste, I suppose.


And CP, having liked only one Mad Scramble out of all of them leads me quite confidently to skip them in the future.

[Gemini Cricket]

Steve's fooling no one. He'll play again... and again... and again...

[Not Afraid]

I have 2 blisters on the bottom of my left foot, but otherwise I'm feeling pretty god in the muscle category. This cold, however, has turned me into a major snot producer. (Hey, I'm trying for payback for the vomit posts. )

As for the game, we tanked. We had a really fun time.....until we ran head-first into a very hard brick wall. GC knew our drawing was the lockers right away. I think we were one of the first to get that packet. Unfortunately, that packet contained a compass and there is where our troubles began. Prudence's fantastic puzzle-solving skills couldn't dig us out of the deep hole we had stepped into. We waited way too long to give in and take a penalty, and therefore we didn't finish.

I found the puzzles in this format to be really fun and challenging, but when you hit that wall, it hurts in a big way. There's not a whole lot of strategy that can be incorporated like there is in classic MA format. This particular event also relied too much on other skills (2 compass activities - one of which was long and hard!). That right there threw us out of the running (although Chris DID bring his own compass as a joke not knowing that it would actually come in handy - that is, IF he knew how to use it.). Next time we WILL bring that grappling hook.

I was also disappointed that the umbrellas came down before 4:00. Not that we could've finished the game in time, but we did spend our last 20 minutes walking around Paradise Pier looking for "Orlando Bloom, Bialystock & Bloom, Move yer Bloomin' arse" or any straw that might work.

We had a lot of fun playing with Pru and GC and would love to play again with these two, since it seems that A is definitely going to be out of the race and Steph is staff. Damnit, DL and MP - stop stealing our team!

[NirvanaMan]

I'm gravely disappointed today. Not because we did so poorly (even though during the game we thought we were) but rather because we did so well and then rushed at the last minute and transposed our answers. The teams of Superstar Losers and Ralph Wiggum, Fej and the POP featuring Nirvanaman were both down two members so we joined forces to form the superteam of Superstar Losers featuring the POP and Nirvanaman (formerly of Ralph Wiggum, Fej and the POP featuring Nirvanaman). Powerhouse that we thought we were, we all failed to produce even one clipboard. Amateur move right there. No worries though, I happened to have a hearty Range Rover brochure handy in my bag that served the purpose just fine.

We were doing great at the beginning, thanks to Andrew's quick thinking, and we were in second place just mere seconds behind first. That is until the evil map/lockers/buzz lightyear quest. None of us rent lockers either so the fact that the number was a locker combination didn't dawn on us until it was far too late. We were sure the drawing was an architectural map of some sort...to the point where we almost convinced ourselves that it was a map of Hollywood in DCA. However, we still couldn't make sense of the code or even what we would do when we got there. We thought the code may refer to numbers on the map, and it did correlate with all of the buildings in the Hollywood section of DCA...but we still had no idea as to what we would do once there. So, we ran around tomorrowland, went in all the stores, and even braved innoventions. Heck, worst case some secret clues might start glowing right? But no luck. We were about to give in...which no one on the team wanted to do...and use the cursed failure envelope to give up on the task and go to the next step. Then Babette reread the clue, which we had all done a million times, and focused in on the word "unlock." We then had a bit of a brainstorm, and decided maybe we should try the lockers...even though there were clearly no instructions of any sort that indicated we should go there. Even still, some on the team were encouraging the use of the dreaded envelope...but we pursued on. After all, there aren't that many lockers in DL right? Once in the locker room, we saw the luggage and cursed the evildooers. Never had I stepped foot in that room before. Drained and feeling like we failed...we moved on.

We did well again from here on out for the most part. We checked into the next location to discover we had fallen back to the 11th place team. Pretty big fall, but perhaps there was still a chance. Isaac saved us 20 minutes of torture by having memorized the entire spiel to the Tiki Room. Bouncing through several answers, depending on how the question was interpreted, he was finally confident of his answer. And really, who knows the park better than him. We trusted his instinct and went with it. This was our chance to catch up a bit after our fake map failure. We opened the envelope. Phew...looks like we were right and this next bit is a legitimate quest. Babette rescued us by breezing through the Soduku, instantly recognizing the need to translate symbols into numbers. Once we had a concept of where we were heading, we assumed incorrectly that the answer would be Splash Mountain. We were aware that DCA was still a possibility but we decided to head down to Splash anyway to save time.

Well it would seem that these fancy soduku puzzles seem to change constantly, as Babette had warned us. We were now certain that we needed to head to DCA and we couldn't be further away. No biggie. We headed to Grizzly, which was wrong (and closed) and we headed back to Soaring to solve the next clue, which we did in record time.

Collecting eyespyes along the way, we were actually doing much better than any of us realized. We had few problems with the compass exercise, save a bit of time having difficulty in tracking down those tires and we called the correct phone number on the first try, after getting all the answers correct. Off to the sunwheel, where Babette's sharp eyes caught those umbrellas, that the rest of us didn't see at first. I really have to argue that an umbrellas is not a bloom, but whatever. It was a lot of fun. So after we solved the remainder of that puzzle, I believe it was time to head back to DL, but not before a quick stop at ToT cause I was sure that art deco clock had to be somewhere over there. It was, and we captured the time (there was some disagreement about this with the officials at the end, but it was resolved).

Back into the park for the final test, which seemed to be more of a wild goose chase than anything so we didn't complete all of it as it didn't seem to make much sense. We correctly solved the final riddle and then we were off to the judging desk with only moments to spare. We then needed to do some funny math with the times on all the clocks we collected (we found all but one of these eyesspys) and then needed to transfer this to the answer sheet. And herein lies the problem. In the chaos of the last minute rushing and screams to turn the packet in, we did not realize that the lettering system used to identify the eyespys failed to follow normal English conventions in that it labeled photos down the column vertically, then over to the next column, as opposed to moving left to right…in the same manner in which we read. This seemingly minor transgression and a failure to double-check our work given time pressures lead to udder devastation as we handed in our answer sheet and watched as large X's were drawn through all of our seemingly correct answers. Wrong wrong wrong…was what we heard. All the right numbers were on the page…we failed to place them in the correct boxes.

So…all that..for naught. 7 hours. Miles of walking. And in the end, we did it all, and did it all correctly. We never gave in to the temptation of the penalty envelopes and we were vigilant in pursuing the eyespys. Needless to say, that leads to mixed emotions. Yes we were one of only 25% of teams to finish. That's little consolation. Actually, it would have felt better had we failed in earnest as opposed to a minor secretarial transgression. What hurt the most was that after what seemed like an impossibility due to our struggles with the locker task, it looks like we would have placed first, instead of ninth, had we simply double-checked the placement of our correct answers. Utterly devastating.

Of course..this is just some silly Mickey Mouse game…right? Right?

[RStar]

Originally Posted by Not Afraid

I'm feeling pretty god in the muscle category.

I make more than my share of typos, but I couldn't help but chuckle on this one. Sorry Lisa!

I thought you felt stronger when I hugged you!!

Oh, and the Buzz quest for the open teams....

We had to ride it 4 times to get the scores right!

Sorry to hear about that little, but devistating mistake, NervanaMan!

[Not Afraid]

OH NO! Ryan (Pru's husband) called. Pru's flight's been cancelled and she won't know if they will be able to get her on another flight today until at least 12:30. Apparently, Seattle is in the middle of a deluge and the airport is closed. Poor Pru's phone has a low battery as well. I may have to go rescue her and give her another night at Hotel Swank. This time, I will slip the comass into HER luggage.