Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 20 “Pikachu English”

Pikachu English #pokémon

Expected solvable difficulty

  • nohint+: experienced solvers
  • keywords+: most solvers

Level design

This level bares the same format as the previous one. However, instead of reading it directly from the hex pattern, the audio has to be heard to solve the question, like to produce the Pikachu noise from the chunk of binary in the game.

The voice was generated with Azure Neural TTS voice Aria, converting the WAV file downloaded to 8000 samples/second, and a simple Python script is written to polarize the each sample to 0 and the max value (0xFF for 16-bit depth) and print the hex value for generating the question. Similarly, another Python script is written to reproduce the WAV file from binary for testing.

Answer to the last sample question: “nineteen six ten” points to the upload date of this Retro Game Mechanics Explained video (2019-06-10).

Here is a sample for the reconstructed audios from the questions. ⚠️ Caution: Adjust your volume before playing.

“Pokemon Yellow Pikachu”
“Nineteen Six Ten”
“Retro Games Mechanics Explained”
“Congratulations”

Expected thought process

From the hint of duration and frequency to deduct that the data below is an audio file of 1-bit depth. Reconstruct the audio file and play to get the answer.

Trivia

Initially, the final answer “congratulations” was changed to “incomprehensible”. However, due to a mistake made placing the question in “Pikachu Cry” instead of “Pikachu English”, and the fact that some challengers have made attempts to solve for “incomprehensible” with some wrong answers, the answer was reverted to “congratulations” at the end.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post’s permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post’s URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.) 要在你自己的网站上回应,请输入你的回应页面的 URL,该页面应包含指向此文章永久链接 URL 的链接。你的回应随后将显示在此页面上(可能需要经过审核)。想更新或删除你的回应?请更新或删除你的文章并再次输入你的文章 URL。(了解更多关于 Webmention 的信息。) 自分のサイトで返信するには、この投稿のパーマリンク URL へのリンクを含む返信ページの URL を入力してください。あなたの返信は(承認後に)このページに表示されます。返信を更新または削除したい場合は、あなたの投稿を更新または削除し、再度その投稿の URL を入力してください。(Webmention について詳しくはこちら。)