unforum

[WJm0139]

Found this on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tKz-IrhgjQ

-b

EDIT: As of 11:50am on 24 December the video is no longer on Youtube

[EarlyWyrm]

Doh, beat me to it by 30 minutes - just rechecked deviceguru's digg post and saw he added the link. A lot of stuff in there just begging to be analyzed, and a very cool new element to the story - game within a tinag...

ETA - the book is "The Histories" by Herodotus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus

Final ETA - "deviceguru" from digg is Rick Lehrbaum, the poster of the youtube video, who runs linuxdevice.com and windowsfordevices.com (and I'm guessing the mystery poster at neowin?) - just found that interesting, althought probably going a bit beyond the curtain...

The notebook screencap turned out far too blurry to be useful, but here are caps of the chinese characters and the book that she's reading:

[WJm0139]

The picture with the Chinese text appears to be the fountains at the Belagio. The book she is reading I believe is the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibson. One thing to note is that both Herodotus The Histories and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are from Pengiun Classics.

-b

EDIT: possible page text: http://tinyurl.com/yygzam

Edit: tinyurled long page widening link -Ehsan

[Bezu]

That's not Chinese, it's Japanese =P

[ymgve]

New photos in the Flickr photostream: http://flickr.com/photos/inzenity/

[JohnLockeGuy]

This game has really taken off... although, am I right in assuming this is all pregame and not 100% necessary to pay complete attention to?

[krystyn]

This looks to be pre-game, sure, but I would say that it's probably not a great idea to assume that details can be glossed over or ignored just because of the phase this game is in. You just never know.

[konamouse]

Video Transcript

[Avatrix]

I'm trying to translate the Japanese (though mine is somewhat rusty). The first line of text (in katakana) is "Bellagio Hotel" (Beraajio). The rest is too garbled, but I'll note what I have in case it is useful.

I cannot make out the first two characters on the second line, but the rest of the 2nd line is hiragana, not kanji. "-no wamu tenashi de" (spacing is my guessing, and may be incorrect). I cannot make out most of the last line, except for the end. "-mushite" (some character) "-rimasu". Gibberish (I think it's just the conjugations) without knowing the kanji.

[drizjr]

[INFO] List of Websites

[konamouse]

Further Speculation

[WJm0139]

Here is the map from the Bellagio website:

[SirQuady]

Defidently 42's work. I decompiled the Flash and it links to a part of 42's website a number of times. And frankly? I doubt anyone else would do so (they'd probably get sued!). That combined with the fact that the cipher box originally appeared on a number of microsoft sites, pretty much puts the blame (and by blame, i mean "YAYAYAY!") on 42.

[konamouse]

Here is a better copy of the Japanese page from the video. It's on the Bellagio's website (they have a huge Asian market).

[Bezu]

A guy called Doug Stockwell posted a new key on the neowin board

imm0rtaliz3m3

leads to a short sound file