The festive background is because I'm reusing a virtual machine from a previous article. Please pay it no mind.

Unlike the last DVD, they are suddenly interested in collecting personal data.

So far this looks a lot like the first DVD game...

...and it pretty much is. I get it. If I was the developer I wouldn't start over each time.

It's really the same deal, open an email and click on the map location to start the investigation.

The trivia questions are back too. Although this first one is about an actual thing and not a story arc thing.

Same deal for the second trivia question. Both of these are answers to puzzles in the previous game.

I'm not sure if I'll describe this puzzle well. You have to scroll through this data and adjust the tuner slider until you find a section that is all bright green. You then hover over the green boxes and figure out which letters the frequency numbers map too.

Here's a mapping of frequency to letter:

0=00.x
1=01.x
2=02.x
3=03.x
4=04.x
5=05.x
6=06.x
7=07.x
8=08.x
9=09.x
A=10.x
B=11.x
C=12.x
D=13.x
E=14.x
F=15.x
G=16.x
H=17.x
I=18.x
J=19.x
K=20.x
L=21.x
M=22.x
N=23.x
O=24.x
P=25.x
Q=26.x
R=27.x
S=28.x
T=29.x
U=30.x
V=31.x
W=32.x
X=33.x
Y=34.x
Z=35.x

After solving the first one it looks like these will all be names found in the season 3 episode Nisei.

That's kind of neat, you can find the solution about 3/4 of the way through that episode. Although it's odd they used a scene from season 3 in the season 2 DVD game if the idea is to find clues by watching episodes.

Ultimately this is another trivia game then.

After solving that it's on to the next case.

This leads to a mini game which you can complete by doing absolutely nothing. You control a lift and are told to keep it under 15 MPH when passing objects. It starts at 10 MPH and there is a slider to speed up/down. Instead of playing with that, you can walk away from the computer and make a coffee while it runs. Maybe someday someone will try speedrunning this. On a positive note, this is taken directly from a season 2 episode (Ascension) and is a sensible idea for a mini game.

Just like that and it's time for the third case.

Like the last game, the map now has many points to interact with.

The next trivia question is from the season 2 episode Colony.

This mini game is very slightly reminiscent of Bomb Squad on the Intellivision. You have to match parts on the left with the helix in the center.

If linking a part causes any of the diamonds on the right to move closer together then leave it. If any move further apart then remove it. This is just a game of trial and error.

Time to move on to the next location.

This trivia question is from the season 2 episode Anasazi.

This next puzzle made me Google "decompile shockwave director file". I am 100% serious. Luckily it can also be solved with a combination of brute force and looking at episode transcripts.

It starts with a mapping of shapes to their phonetic Navajo pronunciation. I have no clue if this is real. If it is, I suppose it's a neat reference.

Then an audio clip plays of someone speaking a string of words. You have to match the words to the icons. Maybe I'm really bad at that kind of thing but I found this impossible. So instead I brute forced tried running each icon against each letter to see what matched when I hit the Test button.

From here you can see the nut icon (Nesh-Chee) matches to the letter N and the ant icon (Wol-La-Chee) matches to the letter A.

This same approach gets us letter E for the elk (Dzeh) also.

OK, so here are all the letters used in this puzzle. The letters all correspond to their English names.

So now we can look at the arc this is following (Anasazi, Paper Clip, The Blessing Way) to guess what the other names might be.

Although one solution is a business name.

Like the previous game, you collect puzzle pieces as you navigate the cases. When you finish the last case it's time to assemble the puzzle.

Except that errored out and forced me back to the beginning of the game where I couldn't proceed past the registration page.

So that's it, game over I guess. I tried Reset Cases, reinstalling, etc. The game kept crashing at the end. If I really wanted to solve this I would try installing the specific version of Shockwave listed in the README file on a clean virtual machine next. I assume Shockwave is always backwards compatible but maybe not.

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