MouseAdventure

[Prudence]

I made it home! Sheesh. It rained something like 6 inches today. At the moment I'm peeved that I went and bought the fancy TSA locks and they STILL cut it off my bag to search it. What the hell kind of scam is that? Now I have to go see what they stole. Grrr.

Stupid stupid compass! I think that for the next MA I will practice starting fires using a flint and catching and preparing my own food from park wildlife.

[innerSpaceman]

Heheheh, the entire game was custom-made for zapppop. I call shenanigans. Ahem, he routinely gets the daily high score on Buzz Lightyear, and who else has the entire (and I mean entire) soundtrack of Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Roomcommitted to memory? (not to mention every other attraction in both parks!)


I have to agree with Babette that the constant puzzles all on one page meant other teammates sitting around doing nothing, or attempting (in my case) to do what I could from looking over shoulder. I much preferred when there was trivia or some other activities to spread among the team members. I am not the main puzzler on my team (though I contributed a bit when things got sticky) ... so, to me, there was all too much nothing going on too much of the time. Though I spend that time trying to figure ways to the answer without doing the puzzle, and that often pans out nicely!


I have to give kudos where due. There were some fun elements ... even in quests that, on the whole, I did not like. Hiding game materials in lockers was clever. Buzz Lightyear score battle was resourceful of a newish attraction. Spying things ON attractions (Disneyland RR, Monsters, Inc.) was a fun twist. Calling in to a phone recording was cute ... but Compasses was an unmitigated disaster (imo) that I hope never to see repeated. (I am reminded of the infamous sextant quest that was thrown out, with everyone getting full credit, after we'd spent almost an hour on it!)


For the Invitational, I was surprised (in an unpleasant way) of how little of the resort was in play. I mean, the last Mad Scramble had us going to The Disneyland Hotel, one of the parking lots, the ESPN Zone and the Grand Cal, in addition to DCA. I really expected to see more outside the usual MouseAdventure Zone of Play ... and I was very disappointed in that regard.

I am also surprised that so many people did not recognize the drawing as luggage and packing boxes. I mean, not necessarily every member of the team ... but certainly the person who transferred the drawings from the original page to the grid. Hmmm, just surprises me. Now, knowing where that stuff was in the Park is something else.

The words "unlock" and "combination" finally gave it to us, but there were so many other hint-like words that ultimately meant nothing. I kinda don't like the vagueness of this Invitational ... in a game where you must complete the task in order to move along.

And, in that vain, I HATED that MouseAdventure Central was in the Esplanade. Sheesh, a Jumpstart or Roadside Assistance should have had no further time penalty than the time it took to get there from a team's likely hang-up point. There were times we would have taken the Jump Start, but were too darn far away from the Esplanade. A 40-minute penalty would have come to twice that!


So we tried to muddle thru ... we did get a little assist from a couple of staffers in the parks, and actually got a good piece of help from MA Central without having to use our Roadside Assistance envelope, which was very nice.

As usual, in fact, the staff was helpful, pleasant, fun and professional throughout. That's one element of MouseAdventure that never varies and is always appreciated.

[Prudence]

Oh yeah - as much as I personally wasn't a fan of the compass, I had a great time. I've had a really rough month, some of which I've disclosed and some of which was just too unpleasant to talk about any more than necessary. I didn't know when I signed up to do this that I would have needed the escape as badly as I did. It could not have come at a better time. I was so busy, it was sunny (sorry, y'all), and I was at the Disneyland Resort with nary a neuron to spare for my spat of angst. It was the perfect time to ignore my life for a few days.

So, thanks to NA and Euro for their generosity and fabulous hosting skills, and to GC for sharing my Coke obssession and making it so that I wasn't the only new person on the team.

April, eh? Hmmmmm.....

[NirvanaMan]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

I am also surprised that so many people did not recognize the drawing as luggage and packing boxes. I mean, not necessarily every member of the team ... but certainly the person who transferred the drawings from the original page to the grid. Hmmm, just surprises me. Now, knowing where that stuff was in the Park is something else.

4 people staring at it for an hour...not one of us saw "luggage". Maybe because we had already decided it was architectural diagram of part of the park, what with all the umbrellas and benches clearly displayed on the map...

Not just that...but we actually redrew it! That's right, because we all rather hastily drew in our own pieces it was a bit sloppy. Not that redrawing it helped us at all! We still couldn't figure out what the hell part of the park it was supposed to represent.

Not that we would have had any idea what to do had we seen luggage...


So does anyone know...what happened if you lost the Buzz battle?

[€uroMeinke]

I had to get up at 5:00 this morning to go to work and finally felt the pain of the day before. Exhausted, sore, and happy to have survived another. I had fun, and eventhough the Sudoko quest misdirected us to Critter Country, it seemed like we always had a chance - well, until the sun wheel anyway. The Compass killed us, bevause it seemed we had three possible locations for each question. Even when we were certain of our answers we must have called something like a dozen stranges in our quest to find the right number. I wish we saw the blooms, that seems like it would have been a great aha moment.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Originally Posted by NirvanaMan

So does anyone know...what happened if you lost the Buzz battle?

You had to play again and again until you beat someone, as RStar said above. GD felt bad because the guy he beat was trying for the third time. Now I'm really glad he always plays Buzz with a game face.

Originally Posted by Nirvanaman

4 people staring at it for an hour...not one of us saw "luggage".

Did any of you look at the original sheets with the pieces? If there was one thing I knew about that damn puzzle it was that they were luggage pieces....but I'm guessing that once they were transposed you just kept looking at the full stack.

Originally Posted by iSm

but Compasses was an unmitigated disaster (imo) that I hope never to see repeated. (I am reminded of the infamous sextant quest that was thrown out, with everyone getting full credit, after we'd spent almost an hour on it!)

I know it's "imo" but but it can't be "unmitigated" if others did well on it...which we did. There was no reason to throw it out because it was totally doable.

ACK my break is over more later

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Did any of you look at the original sheets with the pieces?

Yeah, that's what I meant? Whoever was looking at the original drawings
(unless - sorry to say - really ditzed out) had to know it was packing crates and luggage and trunks. They had shipping labels all over them, by golly. They were perfect line drawings of suitcases, crates and trunks (oh, and one flower pot, huh?)

Originally Posted by €uroMeinke

even though the Sudoko quest misdirected us to Critter Country...

That's where my Skip-the-Frelling-Puzzle skills came into play. Just about any fastpass would work. It was just a matter of finding one of the right ones (of which I suspect there were many). It was far quicker to try a couple of FP locations than to complete the puzzle. (BTW, even though it apparently wasn't the correct answer, a California Screamin' fast pass worked perfectly to decipher the next clue.)

Similarly with the cross-word, just putting in the last line or two got the question that was needed. I suck at puzzles, but am great at figuring out how to get away with as little solving as possible!

[€uroMeinke]

And why is it so hard to get another beer at Mimi's?

[innerSpaceman]

I was glad just to get my dinner.


(after a bit of deja vu reminder of why I haven't been there in years)

[NirvanaMan]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

You had to play again and again until you beat someone

Ouch. Glad we sent Isaac to do it. That was a pretty easy decision.

Did any of you look at the original sheets with the pieces? If there was one thing I knew about that damn puzzle it was that they were luggage pieces....but I'm guessing that once they were transposed you just kept looking at the full stack.

Sure did. I remember saying at one point that we needed to go back to the originals to see if they made any more sense. They didn't. We then thought about cutting out the originals to place on the grids, as perhaps our drawing skills were to blame...they weren't. We saw plenty of buildings, tables, chairs and benches...but certainly no luggage. For whatever reason, I believe our minds were locked on the fact that this was an overhead 2d view of something big, as in a land in DL. Though we did consider the fact that perhaps this was a representation of a mosaic of some sort, even hoping that the mosaics in Inoventions would provide the answer, we never saw luggage. I think its like one of those eye teaser puzzles. Now, had we been able to leave it and come back to it later in the competition, maybe one of the four of us would have seen something else there. But, who knows.