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.

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.