The C3 Hint Thread: July 26th, 2013.
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Going to start us off with one hint for now (there might be some more, but I didn’t want to sit on this one while coming up with others).
- Nascar legend Johnny T. Good is no stranger to victory on the Magnolia Speedway track and he once again triumphed on his Coca-Cola sponsored ’79 Alfa Romeo.
Have fun!
Chuck Berry’s legendary song Johnny B Goode.I think if this clue from July 12th:
Please allow her to introduce herself — she’s a woman of wealth and taste.Led people to think of exactly what they thought it meant (without even questioning who “she” could be), if it’s that on the nose, it’s probably not it.
Yeah, Johnny B. Good would have been incredibly easy.
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif”> In that “headline” there is all you need to know about this Friday’s release minus one song, and there’s more than one song hinted there.- Nascar legend Johnny T. Good is no stranger to victory on the Magnolia Speedway track and he once again triumphed on his Coca-Cola sponsored ’79 Alfa Romeo.
Hmm… a song form 1979 about cars or has some relation to cars.
The Cars – “Double Life”
How the hell did this one fit together? I think the clues need to be less difficult, or at least the difficulty played around with until the sweet spot is found so they actually generate hype and community building well still harboring a challenge, instead of just challenge with obscure references like it is now.
How the hell did this one fit together? I think the clues need to be less difficult, or at least the difficulty played around with until the sweet spot is found so they actually generate hype and community building well still harboring a challenge, instead of just challenge with obscure references like it is now.If you look at the official “hints”, I think they were far more cryptic and often led to much more speculation. Theorycraft and bounce ideas off each other. Build upon it. Nobody says anything unless they’ve got 100% certainty — even the 20 questions version didn’t get a ton of activity until late in the game. Step up your game, team.
We did go with something a little more cryptic this week because giving fairly obvious hints for an artist that made up most of this week’s releases could lead to it not being, well, that much of a surprise, especially if you guessed one artist/song, assumed it would be a pack (based on farottone’s past hinting, that’s not unreasonable) and started looking for ideal matches. The singular hint was a strong indicator that they were related, which could have been a good starting point for rampant speculation.
As for specifics:
“”Nascar legend Johnny T. Good is no stranger to victory on the Magnolia Speedway track and he once again triumphed on his Coca-Cola sponsored ’79 Alfa Romeo“
NASCAR – The song “It’s Raining Again” is often used for rain delays during Fox’s NASCAR coverage.
Johnny T. Good – The lyrics for “School” mention a character named “Johnny Too Good” (optionally spelled “Johnnie Too Good”) in the first verse.
Stranger – A nod to “Goodbye Stranger”.
Magnolia Speedway – While there is actually a Magnolia Motor Speedway, this one is actually hinting to the inclusion of “The Logical Song” on the Magnolia OST (“Goodbye Stranger” was also included, making this a double hint).
Coca-Cola – If you’ve been watching TV at all this year, or popped into a movie theater if my one experience so far this year is any indication, you may have seen the Coca-Cola Security Camera commercials which features a re-recorded version of “Give a Little Bit”. This could be the giveaway if you can connect it to any other dots.
’79 Alfa Romeo – Originally released in 1979, the first line to “Take the Long Way Home” is “well so you think you’re a Romeo”.
The breadcrumbs are all there.
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif”>explanation of clues this weekThe problem is that none of the clues lead to make the initial leap towards Supertramp or that all the clues in the passage are connected (for example not a singles week), so what looks clear to someone who knows the data of Supertramp looks like a needle in the haystack to anyone on the outside, especially for a band that doesn’t come up in the US musical conversation outside of talking about good Wurlitzer albums.
We did go with something a little more cryptic this week because giving fairly obvious hints for an artist that made up most of this week’s releases could lead to it not being, well, that much of a surprise, especially if you guessed one artist/song,This would be in good heart if the songs weren’t released until next week like official releases (and not with announcements), but with the custom releases there’s no weekend of hype to get accustomed with the songs so there’s no hype for the songs between announcement and playing it, so if the artist or songs were to be revealed in the hint thread it would just simulate the break between annoucement and playing Harmonix has.
I have to agree actually. Plus, you have to remember that not all of us are from the USA, so we’re not going to know about NASCAR or whatever commericals Coca-Cola are currently running in the States.
But then again, I know next to nothing about Supertramp, so maybe I’m just being bitchy.
Well, the authors are more than capable of providing softball hints if they want to provide them (or harder ones, in this case), but any I generate will be consistent in complexity with tracks I’ve previously released. They’re cryptic by design. Too cryptic? Perhaps, but I am personally going to err on the side of them being too tough a nut to crack than putting in something that gets guessed within one or two replies the day the hint goes up.
I don’t know, maybe I just approach puzzles like these a little differently, especially with a community that ostensibly could have a combined pool of knowledge to try and work things out. The Coca-Cola comment was the tell for me and, though the rest were obscure, wagering that it was Supertramp, and knowing what farottone had previously hinted (in the “why does Breakfast in America have the Best Of art” conversation), I wagered it might be a pack, and I started to sift through the discography… and then just went straight to the “best of” album.
I figured “Goodbye Stranger” was a given, and reading through its Wikipedia article, I saw that it was on the Magnolia OST. Checking that, I also saw that “The Logical Song” was present. That’s three tracks.
I clicked through the Wikipedia articles for the others (that had them) and saw the footnote about “It’s Raining Again” being used for NASCAR rain delays (I’m not in the US and I don’t watch NASCAR either), so I figured that would be one. That’s four. Beyond that I started looking through lyrics for the rest of the songs and found that there was a Johnny-Too-Good reference early in “School”, and the aforementioned first line of “Take the Long Way Home” potentially covered the Romeo. That puts us to six tracks, which is one hint for each keyword in that sentence (hell, stranger probably isn’t even supposed to be a keyword, just a pun), so I figured it would either be that or more. That would have been what I would have put forward as a guess — even if I hadn’t looked up the lyrics, I’d still have four tracks to guess and get the ball rolling.
Turns out it was that exactly.
You’ve got a pool of resources — theorycraft and hammer things out. None of the hints we give you are so obtuse that they cannot be discovered with a pool of common knowledge, though we do try to make sure they’re not easily Googleable. If the authors in a given week are all good with a relative softball, we’ll give that a shot and see how it goes.
I pretty much knew what was coming and found the clues to be too cryptic. I’ve never associated Give A Little Bit with Coca-Cola. etc.
Just because someone guesses something correctly doesn’t mean it should be validated before the release. People need to come back Friday to see if they were right. So I don’t think correct guesses are a bad thing. I would think that if people are able to guess that it would encourage more to participate. The trick is to make it easy enough to guess, but hard enough so that no one can prove it.
The trick is to make it easy enough to guess, but hard enough so that no one can prove it.You don’t say…
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif”> We’re doing our best here, it’s all in good fun, if we fail giving out good and fun hints, bear with us. 
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