Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?

[toblix]

Yeah. My secret hope was that they were testing some brilliant new high-performance high-volume collaboration prototype. If that article is true, and they're actually trying to achieve this through half-assing a backend, my hopes and dreams for the remaining "experiments" have been crushed.

[Roderick]

I just had an idea of what's inside the cube. It's a message from Molyneux that says: "If you keep this message and the secret of the cube to yourself for one month, you'll get a million euros." That would both be an amazing incentive to keep it a secret, and continue social experiment side of the game. The winner, who would of course have to be identified as such, would experience an incredible, life-changing month as the entire world would be hanging on his lips to divulge the secret.

[Orv]

Jeff Gerstmann raised a good point on this weeks Bombcast that the TOS for Curiosity states that you cannot sell what you get from inside the cube. It might just be legal wording, but his "you can't sell money, cause it's... money" point is important.

He also pointed out that 22Cans is supposedly doing 22 of these "experiments" and in light of the apparent shitshow that Curiosity has been...

[ThunderPeel2001]

The server backend is a simplistic PHP application, I can only guess it actually uses some form of database for it, why otherwise would you use PHP

The person who wrote this article is an idiot. This is like saying, "Apparently this car has a simplistic steering wheel interface. I can only guess that it has wheels on the outside, why otherwise would you need a steering wheel". Really insightful.

Firstly, Facebook and Wikipedia run on PHP; You cannot infer anything from its use. Secondly, of course there's a bloody database!

[TychoCelchuuu]

And that article didn't really say anything other than "Curiosity doesn't work very well" which I think we could perhaps have discovered without having bothered to read the article. We could, for instance, have read this thread.

[Thrik]

Yeah, very dumb article in some ways. It did get me thinking about how they could possibly manage things such as clearing layers and — most importantly — breaking the final block without serious synchronisation issues. You'd need some very smart code for that, including checking with the database much frequently as the game approaches the aforementioned important events.

Of course, the fact I still can't even get into the damn game suggests it may not be so bulletproof. I'm not even convinced they have a reasonable web infrastructure, the amount of traffic they're getting doesn't sound like it should be frying a well-engineered and well-financed set-up.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Well they seem to have fixed the bugs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this game is 100% free to play, right?

[Frenetic Pony]

Yep, 100% F2P (if you want). Though you can apparently purchase items with real moneysssss from the store, or just coins you get.

My little sister's played this quite a bit. Molyneux is great, and I'm glad he's out from under Microsoft's braindead heel. Even if I don't want to play his ultimate game (whatever it is) a drop I'm still glad it and Molyneux are there to show up all the factory churned and unoriginal games out there.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Hmm. It can be quite addictive trying to get the largest amount of cublets in a single go. My current highscore is 13,695.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yep, 100% F2P (if you want). Though you can apparently purchase items with real moneysssss from the store, or just coins you get.

My little sister's played this quite a bit. Molyneux is great, and I'm glad he's out from under Microsoft's braindead heel. Even if I don't want to play his ultimate game (whatever it is) a drop I'm still glad it and Molyneux are there to show up all the factory churned and unoriginal games out there.

I can't see how you can spend real money? Only coins.

[Iosef Stalin]

The best Moly troll would be if inside it was just a voucher for a DVD of this crappy ITV gameshow.

[melmer]

Or a parody of said crappy game show

Ooooooooooooooosh

[Frenetic Pony]

I can't see how you can spend real money? Only coins.

Maybe they cancelled it? I remember Molyneux talking about this crazy assed chisel someone could buy for $17,000 to nigh guarantee them being the one to see inside the cube, but I don't know if it has or even will make it to the actual game.

Oh, and what's inside the Cube... IS YOU! BRAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

[ThunderPeel2001]

Well we know it's a link to a video. That's what's inside the Cube. What's in the video is another thing entirely.

I can only presume it's this: https://www.youtube....l&v=xWOVkQ_Rm1g

[Orv]

Clearly it's going to be a biting commentary on how you've wasted all this time.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Wow, people are blasting through this thing. Last time I posted the cube looked new... now there's hardly anything left on it.

[Thrik]

Finally got in after ThunderPeel's tip yesterday. It's undeniably put together well in terms of the experience, so maybe they have put a lot of thought into the concerns above after all and they were simply tripped up by an inadequate web set-up — it happens.

While I can't see myself spending any real amount of time with it, I'm glad I tried it out and can say I did long after the hype (and the game) have disappeared. In a weird way it's nice to have been part of it. They should make the game just do nothing once the cube is demolished, rather than going into some kind of demo mode.

This will probably sound retarded but I got a really weird Black & White vibe when zooming in on the cube. I think it was the sound design, similar in terms of how the ambience changes as you move around and zoom in (as we did with islands as a god in B&W). I dunno, it just took me back for a moment. God damn I loved those games!

[toblix]

With the latest update «you will get to see the cube shatter as other people tap away at it,» which I'm pretty sure means they're just removing blocks at random. Also, you can buy a one-off statistics listing for real actual money, which has to be some kind of first.

[Thrik]

Yeah I gave the tapfest another go today and it is nicer now they're showing other taps. They definitely seem real (patterns, etc) but it is very abstracted as you zoom out — when viewing the whole cube relatively large segments of it have god rays flashing from them. It looks cool and makes it feel less like a weird solitary experience.

Of course it's still as boring as a sewn-up axe wound after about five minutes of play. I wonder what the player time investment stats are like.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I found enjoyment in trying to beat my highscore through chaining multipliers. Top score: 18756

[ThunderPeel2001]

New hiscore: 52873 - with enough free space, I reckon you could do 100k

[Orv]

You can't even touch the next level until the current one is clear, right?

[Roderick]

What's the ETA on this fucker?

[Orv]

A year at the current rate was the best math I heard last month. No idea about now.

[ThunderPeel2001]

What's the ETA on this fucker?

A layer is broken down every 8 hours. I don't know how many layers there are.