My current big ARG right now is another 42 production, for Resistance 2 on the PS3. The element is similar in style to the Dark Knight's periodic 'trails', though this comes back essentially to a twice-a-week update schedule, where Friday reveals results of a vote, and the Tuesday becomes a hunt for top secret documents.

I've definitely enjoyed the puzzles so far. I'm wondering where the veteran puzzle-sovlers are though! Seems like the majority of the people following the arg are relative new-comers to the genre (which a great thing!). I've been participating in these weekly puzzle trails, and kind of surprised at typically being within the first five people to submit the final code (identifying top secret documents).

Anyway, here's a brief overview of a couple of the nicely formed puzzles we've had to push through...

One was a couple of weeks ago, and culminated in a big mapping problem. Part 1: 1) map out 26 coordinates (in the form X-Y-quadrant) 2) double each coordinate distance from the "HQ" 3) mark off each new location by the initial coordinate letter Part 2: 1) using the key in the lower right, connect each letter pair with a line 2) find where each intersection overlaps a numbered geographical location 3) mark each location - this outlines a 'quaranteen zone' 4) more importantly, take each number from smallest to largest in one string, separated by hyphens 5) this string is a filename in the SRPA Terminal (which subsequently leads to a mashup of additional files) This one took, with teamwork, no more than 1 1/2 hours to solve. It was just tedious :P (Full puzzle trail outlined here)

The second one was this week... and wow, this one had no instructions, so there was no guide for the solution - no idea what we were looking for, or a process to get there. It required a bit of intuition for the puzzle content, and lots of pattern recognition and trial and error... at least that was my experience. * An audio file was downloaded with what sounded like a long message in morse code. But there was too much variation in the signal to make out what exactly was morse. * As people now typically do when getting a strange audio file, it was put through a spectrogram analyzer (draws out a 'map' of the sound spectrum as it's played, to see the sound as an image) * The resulting image made it clearer what the 'morse' code really was - strings of dual-layered bits of beeping. But they appeared, at the smallest level, to be 'grouped' in blocks of 2 rows by 3 columns, as if each was code for a letter or number or something. * In the end, after about 8 hours of tedious puzzle-gazing, I managed to get to the solution... an example of the actual process is depicted in the image below (only one word, because, well, the entire message took forever, and I didn't decode it manually the whole way anyway; after a while the repeated letters stood out and it was easier to form the words by seeing the patterns) THAT was a crazy puzzle! (Full puzzle trail outlined here)

If you're not yet following this game yet, the main sites to start with are ProjectAbraham.com, GetAWarJob.com, and AmericaFirstAmericaOnly.com. The player wiki is at fallofman.wikibruce.com (linked to the timeline). The video game itself is set in an alternate timeline (a different history than ours) in the 50's during a war-time with (what else) aliens/genetic mutations, etc... I'm not fully up to speed on the franchise's story yet :)