Pronounced My-Key-On: by Michael Quach

Solutions are on the youtube page of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVejv9sHLg

I’ve come across one of the best dungeons I’ve expereienced in a while. A dungeon where it relies on your thinking to solve and where you need to read the lore behind the world to understand. I loved the riddle puzzles as I actually read the lore behind each of the characters and found it a nice break to solve puzzles without having to kill a bunch of monsters.

The bridge itself is another example of a thought puzzle in the game, after figuring out that I needed a combo of two characters to keep the bridge up, a third to move around and open up a new path, and my fourth to walk across, I was amazed. Finally, a thinking puzzle. I took out some pen and paper and began recording which stones I needed to stand on in order to make a path across, testing each stone with a character moving all around. After about 10 minutes, I got my solution and was on my way to the Sacred Urn of Andraste.

So I entered into the Maximum PC podcast contest last week, found here http://www.maximumpc.com/article/no_bs_podcast/no_bs_podcast_121_windows_7_live , on identifying the Windows startup sound they played and explaining which one was your favorite. Below is what I put as my favorite startup sound.

I first encountered Windows 98 in 1999, when we got a new computer and my parents allowed me to buy my first pc video game. That game was the original Rainbow 6 and every day, the Windows 98 startup sound would echo through the house from my speakers as I began my PC gaming career. Windows 98 is my childhood; it was there when I began PC gaming, it was there when I began my foray onto the internet and all its wonders and horrors; and it was there when I finished elementary school. Windows 98 is why I am here today. That startup sound will always remind me of my childhood and I will always hold it dear to my heart.

To explain further, that was the operating system where I truly began exploring other games available to me. Before then, I was just another kid who sat at home all day watching tv, but now, with my 56k modem and AOL, I began learning about things like other internet speeds, lag, and courtesy (back then where I played, there was no flaming, people were actually nice and helped each other out). It was like a sort of awakening for me. Windows 98 was the platform when I started making friends who didn’t care how I looked, just that I was a nice guy who played games with them. That’s all they needed in order to start a friendship and become a community. It was because of these friends that I made I was gradually introduced to other kinds of PC games such as real time strategy in Age of Empires, Role Playing Games in NeverWinter Nights, and text games called Multi User Dungeons (MUD). I would even say that because of Windows 98 and its introduction of video games, that I began geeking out and learning about technology and made me the “computer guy” in my family.

Without Windows 98, I might not have become a PC gamer, I might not have begun my education into learning the latest tech, I might not even have all these e-friends that I now have and the communities I belong to which has lasted longer than real life groups and friends. So to Microsoft, Thank you for Windows 98 and beginning my career of pc gaming.

P.S. I also won Cities XL, woot!