A game puzzle has lead to a Google puzzle... help!

January 30, 2006 1:37 PM

Why are my Google skills failing me when searching for help with a specific puzzle in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel? (Caution - may be spoilers!)

I've got into the vault via the City of Los, and have negotiated my way through to residence level 2, and the library.
Contained therein is a puzzle which - in essence is a set of 9 binary switches, where each of 3 valid combinations opens a different door. Two of these combinations are obvious (and are mentioned in an in-game artifact). The third combination is obviously going to be one of the remaining 510 options... yuck!
I approached this logically to start with, but got fed up once I reached 64; the interface (on the XBox) makes the process even more tedious than it would otherwise be - no mean feat!

So I decide to resort to Google. A few iterations of search criteria leaves me with the following search string:
fallout "brotherhood of steel" vault library console shelves puzzle walkthrough
For some reason, however, this gives two pages of results the majority of which appear to be completely unrelated to my search and/or originate from Belgium.

Two questions, then:
1) What gives with the Google search (why's it beinging back all those odd results? Isn't the Google search algorithm supposed to prevent keyword/metadata spamming?
2) How do I solve the puzzle, with mimum RSI and hair-loss? :-)

TVMIA!

posted by Chunder to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Did you check on gamefaqs.com?
posted by smackfu at 1:41 PM on January 30, 2006

gamefaqs says '110100100'
via http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/xbox/game/589789.html
posted by yeoz at 1:48 PM on January 30, 2006

Aha! Not come across that site before - rather handy...! Thanks ;-)

I'd just gone back off wandering and had found the code as "a strange number scratched into the side of the arcade machine". Perfectly logical. *sigh*

Odd how gamefaqs never even came up in the search though - at least I'll know for the future...
posted by Chunder at 1:58 PM on January 30, 2006

I bet gamefaqs doesn't come up because they prevent direct linking to the FAQs (because they are just text files w/o ads). So Google doesn't see many inbound links, and they don't have a great pagerank.
posted by smackfu at 2:25 PM on January 30, 2006

Actually, gamefaqs will come up if you just type in the name of the game plus "gamefaqs". Great game, by the way.
posted by Mercaptan at 5:44 PM on January 30, 2006

OK - I've also managed to find the answer to the Google results problem: "Splogs" apparently...
posted by Chunder at 6:45 AM on January 31, 2006