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Game Cartridges: Vol 1⚓︎

Difficulty:
Direct link: https://gamegosling.com/vol1-uWn1t6xv4VKPZ6FN/index.html?&challenge=gameboy1

Objective⚓︎

Request

Find the first Gamegosling cartridge and beat the game

Hints⚓︎

Gameboy 1

From: Dusty Giftwrap

1) Giving things a little push never hurts. 2) Out of sight but not out of ear-shot 3) You think you fixed the QR code? Did you scan it and see where it leads?

Approximate Proximity

From: Dusty Giftwrap

Listen for the gameboy cartridge detector's proximity sound that activates when near buried treasure. It may be worth checking around the strange toys in the Tarnished Trove.

Finding it⚓︎

There is a web socket stream transporting most of the in-game data. A message type "AAANNNDD_SCENE" contains the "grid" of the current location, but also the coordinates of NPCs and items. Teleporting to all locations while monitoring these messages ultimately reveals the locations of the "gameboy1" item.

     "entities": {
            "item": [
                {
                    "id": "gameboy1",
                    "x": 31,
                    "y": 25,
                    "z": 2,
                    "hash": "1c9303e1cde67a22fd26e9de2c332df9"
                }
            ],

It is in Tarnished Trove, at (x:31, y:25).

Bringing the coordinates of other entities like the entrance and NPCs in relation to their position on the screen shows that the coordinates start in the upper left corner, below a hat in the middle of a small lake.

screenshot

Winning the Game⚓︎

Running the gameboy cartridge shows our glorious dwarfen game character inside a maze of blocks that form a broken QR code. When our game character "sings" at some blocks, their correct position is revealed. We now have to push those blocks Sokoban-style towards their destination.

Drawing a map helped a lot; when finally all six blocks are at aligned, the game ends and shows the repaired QR code: qrcode

The QR code contains the URL 8bitelf.com. There, we receive the string

flag:santaconfusedgivingplanetsqrcode

And "santaconfusedgivingplanetsqrcode" is the answer to this challenge.

Admonitions⚓︎

Emulator

For performance reasons, I had to download the game cartridge and use an external emulator - in my case, VisualBoyAdvance.

Images⚓︎

Answer

santaconfusedgivingplanetsqrcode