Adventure

Author

Joe Seaton (js845)

Description

This puzzle presented the teams with a good old-fashioned text-based adventure game. Players navigated through a series of rooms, interacting with various items. In true text-based adventure style, teams were left to figure out commands on their own, with typically cryptic messages for incorect commands. A guest appearance was made by prominent megalomaniac Evil Robot (in disguise). It is rumoured that a coveted portrait of a much-loved member of the CL security department was also present, but this is a myth.

The real key (sorry) to solving the puzzle was in working out how to use the "wand of hex". This wand allowed users to cast "hexes" on objects with a magic hexadecimal number. After working out the correct puns, notably including 0xBEEF on a slab of meat, to make a key for opening a DEADlock, teams were eventually freed from this punishment, and the final spell produced the answer.

Unfortunately the fun part of this puzzle had to be disabled due to technical problems. As the final part of the puzzle, teams would have to work out, as prompted by a suitable pun, that packet-sniffing was in order. Upon deeper inspection, they would find that the identify field (also punned-at) of the IP headers was tied to the room they were currently in. For the final room, this value would give them the answer to the puzzle. Sadly the home-grown TCP/IP code was not quite up to the task, and the puzzle had to be modified to be fair to teams without access to wireshark under Linux.

Solution

c1a551e55

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