By Chris Cox, Hollywood.com Staff

Blogging the Salt Game

Day X Exists - Mission 9:

This is it. The final chapter. The last week of nine for the online game found at www.dayxexists.com, a tie-in into the July 23rd release of the Angelina Jolie starring movie Salt. I'm kind of sad, really. To my surprise, more often than not, these playable missions were fun, although of wildly varying difficulty. This last week's game is by far the most entertaining to play of all of them, being an out and out shooting gallery.

Last week, on Agent Salt's (or presumably Agent Salt's) surreptitious directive, I was pointed at a meet-up of agents that I'd been tracking as part of the Day X conspiracy and was told that the play-nice time was over. Time to lock and load: I was gonna snipe these jerks. It was no problem for me, only, once the dust cleared, it turned out the folks I was pointed at were actually CIA agents on the task force to track down Day X operatives. Big oops. Knowing something was rotten in Denmark, as far as Agent Salt was concerned, and now on the run from my own agency, I tracked down Salt to a Day X safehouse and went inside, guns-a-blazing.

This game is a target and shoot, with three levels of difficulty. There's a lot of these pesky buggers to take out, but head shots work REAL well. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I finally battered my way through the ruffians to find a wall covered with pictures of Day X operatives and a phone call from Salt who had tricked me and was NOT there after all, telling me I'd asked all the wrong questions, especially where she was concerned. With my ex-boss and his boys on his way in to slap me in cuffs, all I have left to ask is...WTF, Salt? What a bitch move.

What happened? How does this tie into the movie? Is Angelina Jolie going to actually be an evil agent after all or is this entire thing a red herring? Regardless of any of that, this was a fun series of games to play which certainly whetted my appetite for the upcoming movie. And hey, I still have to focus on figuring out all the bonus clue codes (they get progressively harder...a LOT harder) and see what that nets me. Maybe it'll deliver a happy ending. I need a happy ending.

Click here to Check out the Mission 8 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 8:

This is it. So close to the truth. Or at least, the truth as far as I'm allowed to discover in the promotional online game (www.dayxexists.com) for the upcoming July 23rd US release of the Phillip Noyce directed, Angelina Jolie starring spy thriller. This is the next to last week of the game and, despite myself, I find myself not only becoming involved in what's going to happen to the innocent junior agent who is my avatar in this weekly series of playable interactive adventures, but in the upcoming film as well. I'd call that effective marketing, as this story seems pretty darn cool.

At this point, we know who the players all are in this Day X conspiracy to do something nasty and evil. We've tracked them all down to the DC area, have a fairly good idea of what they're planning, and more or less how. At least, it seemed that way when this eighth week of intrigue began. Agent Salt called to say that she's unscrambled the code in the Chess cypher I found last week (because apparently the CIA is all but useless without her) and it says that the four main players are all meeting together inside a Baltimore Maryland container yard. The time for playing nice is over. She left a sniper rifle for me to do what had to be done, the final step to clearing her name and putting an end to the Day X conspiracy.

This game involves looking at a silhouetted view of the container yard and killing the four conspirators. Salt talked me through it, giving me advice to get them to come out of their meeting one at a time so I could pick them off without the others cluing in what was going on and escaping. Only the last one was a pickle, as it involved darkness and some guesswork as to timing, but still, nothing too taxing. Until I got away and read the mission reports.

Oops. Turns out, the CIA claims the assassinated folks were agents as part of an 'off radar' group investigating the Day X incidents. Documents I found on the bodies seem to back that up. What happened? Is the CIA involved in the conspiracy? Did Agent Salt Lie? Or, for that matter, has this really been Agent Salt I've been talking to the whole time? It is a scrambled phone, after all. Many mysteries await for one more final week until they're solved, both with the final installment of the "Day X Exists" games, and then with the release of the film. Man, I hate being used. I hope the next game is me machine gunning pieces off of whoever set me up. Somebody is gonna pay. Hopefully.

Click here to Check out the Mission 7 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 7:

Angelina Jolie better be doing a better job as a secret agent than I am. Not that anyone would ever have any doubts about that. Just watching the trailer for the upcoming July release of her new spy thriller Salt puts to rest any consideration that I might even last through the opening credits. Such feats of physical exertion that her Agent Evelyn Salt performs in it are well past my meager, internet writing, couch-sitting, pizza-eating abilities. Should the United States of America ever require someone to photoshop a picture or get a high score in a video game though, I'd be proud to come to the support of our nation. Luckily, in the online game series "Day X" at www.dayxexists.com, I don't have to stretch my abilities much past those sets of skills.

The game lets you play as a CIA agent who believes the maligned Agent Salt, now gone undercover due to her being falsely fingered as a double agent, is innocent. Each week at the website, you get a video of a new phone call being received from Agent Salt, leading you towards sources of information about the apocalyptic Day X conspiracy. Fortunately, even though the bosses don't realize you're working with her, you can pass on all the intel you gather thanks to her, making you a sure-shot for promotion when all this wraps up. That is, assuming we don't all get blowed up before then.

This week, Salt notified me that she had tracked down Catherine Hicks aka Sylvia Asimov, a Russian working for Day X who received a mysterious package from another Russian, Archie Johnson aka Vladimir Motoya. Last week, despite your hard work, she managed to slip past the CIA men on her tail. Thankfully, Agent Salt is worth her namesake. The package Hicks has been carrying is believed to contain information vital to whatever Day X has planned, so Salt sent me into the safe house where Hicks was laying low, in order to see if I could get the info.

The game itself involves a meter at the top of the screen that, while watching a video of me sneaking around the safe house, swings from left to right. My test is to use the left and right arrow keys to keep it from swinging too far to either side and getting caught by the Day X guards. By far the easiest of the challenges so far, I got past the thugs and found a safe which contained a number of possibly intriguing things: some circuit boards that may have been stolen by an ex-employee of Archie Johnson's who now works for a weapons and development facility called Rannick Labs that are making missile guidance systems for the US government; information about the mysterious Russian chemical Illenium that certainly is going to be part of the Day X attack; and a series of algebraic chess scores that turn out to be the exact list of moves from a 1969 chess tournament between two Soviet grandmasters. The meaning of this is entirely unclear.

The CIA seems to think that the scores may point at a local DC Chess cafe and are watching it closely, which is the first thing in this game series so far that honestly makes me afraid. Is next week's playable game on the website going to be chess? I hope not. I was always more of a "Candyland" kind of guy.

Click here to Check out the Mission 6 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 6:

Another week, another phone call from Agent Evelyn Salt. Normally I'd be pleased at getting a phone call from a super-hottie like salt, but this isn't a booty call. Salt is super, sure: a super-SPY for the CIA who has been framed as a double agent and now is on the run trying to prove her innocence and stop some nefarious folk from putting the mysterious and ominous sounding Day X into action in three weeks. Naturally, after looking at those lovely eyes, I have no choice but to believe her and, in fact, assist her efforts to uncover the conspirators and clear her name. And maybe I'll get coffee out of it. You know. Later.

This week on the online game you can play as well at www.dayxexists.com, Agent Salt called to tell me that Archie Johnson, the security contractor who picked up the unknown package delivered by the plane I tracked last week, has flown it into Washington DC in order to meet up with Catherine Hicks....or should I say, Sylvia Asimov? And I'm not sure I should call Archie by his name either. Isn't anyone using their real name here? From here on out, I think I'll make Agent Salt and everyone else call me, Stone "Danger" Jackson. I mean, why not at this point?

Salt told me she had placed a tracer on the package, but it has relatively weak signal. So much so that my services were required in order to trace it. The goal of the mission/game was to click on signal towers around his car to see how closely they indicate the package was in range of them. They showed as red if out of range, orange if near range, and green if dead on. When I lost him briefly, a timer started beeping faster and faster, but I always managed to catch up with him before he got away. I wish the CIA could say the same. Once I delivered the coordinates of the meeting, the CIA got some pictures of him delivering the package to Hicks, but lost track of her afterward. What, do I have to do everything around here? You just can't get good secret agent help these days.

Make sure when you've taken on and successfully finished this mission yourself, that you take a close look at the four mission reports provided for you. There's some intel there about that Russian chemical Illenium we uncovered info about a few weeks ago and how it got moved into a chemical weapons program that should prove important, as well as news of a explosives heist at a Columbian military base that seems to be the work of Day X operatives. As we move closer to the deadline, things look possibly grim for the cause of good. Or for the cause of getting Agent Salt to buy me that coffee later. Even if I screw up ultimately at my end, I can still go see the movie, coming out July 23rd in America and August 20th in the UK to watch Angelina Jolie, who plays Agent Salt in the film, get at least HER part of the mission right. And blow stuff up. Cool.

Click here to Check out the Mission 5 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 5:

Being a spy is hard. That's the lesson that so far I've taken away from playing the tie-in online game to the upcoming Angelina Jolie thriller, Salt, located at www.dayxexists.com. Sure, Agent Evelyn Salt, who's been falsely accused of being a double agent, is the one presumably leaping around onto moving vehicles, narrowly dodging bullets, and riding the wave of huge explosions...I mean, I guess. Not that my job isn't important. Somebody's gotta be the inside man, piping information to Salt so she can do the rough and tumble part of the job. Even so, I'm thinking I'm not gonna end up on an expensive yacht with a beautiful girl at the end of this one.

While being the back-up guy is pretty thankless, it's still fun. Due to my continued efforts over the last four weeks, I've delivered a pretty payload of important intel secretly to Agent Salt and overtly to the CIA. Last week I figured out who one of the key members of the Day X conspiracy was, a Catherine Hicks who works for a trucking company called Vauxon. Evidence that suggested that she might actually be a Russian asset known as Sylvia Asimov gained more ground this week. Turns out that Asimov supposedly died in a house fire due to faulty electrical wiring at the age of 19 but dental records were mysteriously inconsistent. So, we can almost safely assume at this point that Hicks is indeed who we suspect she is, but what is she up to?

Agent Salt pointed me at what 'The Raven' is that Hicks mentioned on the phone call we intercepted last week. It's a private plane which Salt helped me to sneak aboard on so I could install a GPS tracer. This was the playable game, picking which tool to use on which parts of the onboard computer so as to install the trace and get out of the plane before the pilot returned. The secret is to look for the white dots on the computer and then pick the right tool to use which should glow with a green activator dot when you're in the right place. After the difficulty of some of the past missions I'd been sent on, this was a relative and welcome breeze.

So what did we learn? The plane made stops in Florida and Texas before landing in the Yuma Desert in Arizona where its cargo, whatever that is, was loaded onto a truck leased by a security contractor named Archie Johnson who not only has several big Department of Defense contracts, due to his law-enforcement background, but is planning to fly 'something' into Washington per a phone conversation with Catherine Hicks aka Sylvia Asimov. The plot....thickens.

Only four more weeks and four more games to go. I'm looking forward to seeing not only how this plays out, but to seeing the movie which goes into wide release in America on July 23rd and on August 20th in the U.K. After all my tinkering, and photographing, and tapping, and surreptitious behavior of all kinds on her behalf, I'm looking forward to being able to sit back and enjoy watching stuff blow up real good.

Click here to Check out the Mission 4 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 4:

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Now, you may ask, what can I do? How do I get involved? If you're not actually asking those questions, you should be, because there's something pretty darn cool you CAN do. Go to www.dayxexists.com to play the "Day X Exists" game. There you can play a series of missions and watch their accompanying videos that lead into the story of the film. Each mission is an entirely different type of gameplay as Agent Evelyn Salt recruits your help from within the CIA to help uncover information about the apocalyptic 'Day X' and it's operatives and in the process, clear her name with the agency.

We're up to Week four now and the game is seriously afoot. Last week I managed to identify a command level operative for the agency named Michael Simms. This week, because of a hard drive I tapped for information, I was able to trace him to a meeting with someone codenamed S.A. I entered the building across from the meet and set up a laser microphone to record their conversation. Unfortunately, these things have a pin-point directional range.

The game involves looking at silhouettes of the enemy agents across the way and aiming the crosshairs of the microphone at the right person at the right time to catch as much of the conversation as possible. The key is to do it a few times until you figure out the order in which the three (!) people in the room and the voice on the speakerphone talk until you can record at least 70% of the conversation.

So what do we know now? The voice on the phone is Catherine Hicks, a mid-level manager at a trucking company called Vauxon that recently suffered the theft of three of their trucks transporting rare wiring used for high-powered explosives. It looks like it was an inside job and Hicks set it up. Not a big surprise since the agency believes she's actually a Russian asset known as Sylvia Asimov. It's not clear who the name she mentioned, The Raven, refers to. Add another mystery to the file. Either way, it was another solid day of backup agenting by me, another addition to my steadily increasing score-box on the game, and one week closer to solving the mystery of Day X and Evelyn Salt.

Click here to Check out the Mission 3 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 3:

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After last week's observation of an exchange between Day X agents that I got to surreptitiously photograph, thanks to a heads up from Agent Salt,I got another message from her. This time she was pointing me towards a hidden hard drive left in a university quad by another Day X operative. The man who left it was a janitor named Michael Simms, who apparently used to be a lab tech at the university but had been laid off and stayed on in the maintenance department. There was no explanation for regular money transfers to an account he holds in Bermuda under the name Davidoff Marachenko. He is believed to actually be a Ukrainian national.

My job was to hack into the hard drive wirelessly (using a PSP portable, in case you forgot this was a Sony film). The game itself was similar to Tetris in that different shaped pieces would pop up and I had to line them up from one side of the screen to the other so a signal could go through. In the meantime, a red pulse was slowly creeping up on me so time was indeed a factor. Easily the hardest learning curve of the three games, the secret was to pay attention to what pieces were coming up next so I could plan accordingly,and make sure that any pieces I wanted to discard were placed considerably out of the way of the path I planned on taking. There were three screens, each progressively more difficult until my goal was reached with a sigh of relief!

Uncovered in the files from the hard drive was the chemical formula for a dangerous fertilizer that was developed and discarded by the Soviets in the seventies called Illenium One. Apparently it was causing a series of mysterious illnesses but it's unclear why the Day X spies are interested in it. Also there was a ciphered message that seems too difficult for the cryptologists at headquarters to know what to do with except that the words "Simms, Connection, 0300, and S.A." all seem to be key words. Bets that this will have something to do with my mission next Tuesday? I guess I'll find out then!

Click here to Check out the Mission 2 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 2:

We're one week closer to the release of the spy thriller Salt, starring Angelina Jolie as a super-agent who is forced to go on the run when she is accused of being a double agent working against the CIA for the evil folks over at some sort of 'Day X" conspiracy. It must suck to be Agent Evelyn Salt, who Jolie plays in the film, but it's fun to be her contact at the CIA who believes in her innocence, the role you can play online at the Day X Exists website.

After the 'how well can you lie to your boss' game from last week, which I'm sure many of us came away from as an important lesson if we're playing it at work, this time around Agent Salt calls us on our illicit cell phone to point us at a command level operative of Day X who is making an exchange in a nearby park. So, high-end super zoomy camera in hand, we go to a nearby rooftop to take pictures of the meet. The challenge of the game is to take pictures in focus so that the people involved can be identified. Which, is not anywhere near as easy as it sounds.

I had to use the left and right arrows on my keyboard to keep the image in focus as the camera lens pointed towards three suspicious folks in the park. Occasionally a red target would come up which meant it was time to snap away. A man and a woman known to be Lithuanian nationals converged with a third man who may very well be the higher-up guy we've been looking for. They exchanged an envelope with a strange symbol that even the CIA database didn't recognize. But now, there's actually some info to go on until week three.

A helpful hint here is that the game is point based. Try the best you can to get the camera in focus, but the moment that red reticule pops up, just click the mouse like crazy as close to it as you can get. Otherwise you'll fail. Like I did. Three times. Tighten up your clicking muscles, my friends or you'll get told exactly what a failure you are. If you manage to get it right, and believe me there's certainly plenty of room for improvement on my score which I'd imagine with come out to around a C minus if it was in school terms, your boss from the first week game explains the situation and what we've learned from the pictures.

So another week, another game I'm going to beat my ahead against the wall to get the highest score I can, and, don't forget, another secret word hidden on the site. Look carefully at the mission report text in the four boxes that come up once you're done to figure that one out. I'm not sure if the bonus codes have started to be planted yet on the accompanying twitter or facebook sites for the film. But I'm sure looking. See you in another week.

Click here to Check out the Mission 1 Recap

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Day X Exists - Mission 1:

Hollywood is not filled with dummies, despite some reports to the contrary. The powers that be are taking advantage of the potential of interactive content online to compliment their cinema releases. Lots of big films get fun mini-games on their associated websites. Some TV shows have even had ridiculously complex 'search the internet' games that requires hours and hours of work to uncover clues. Luckily, the folks behind the website connected to the new Angelina Jolie spy thriller, Salt, are more concerned that you just have a good time.

The film follows super-agent Evelyn Salt who is forced to take it on the lam when a KGB defector points at her as being a sleeper agent for a underground organization full of nasty folk trying to bring about an apocalyptic "Day X". The game, Day X Exists, (you can play it here) places you as a CIA agent who Salt contacts to try to help her clear her name. Nine weeks will present nine different missions with nine different types of gameplay all eventually leading up to the film's actual release on July 23rd.

The opening mission begins with a relatively high production value flash movie. Agent Salt contacts you through a hidden code and you skip out of the "Day X" staff meeting at the CIA building in order to find a phone that you can use to covertly communicate with her. Problem is, when you get back, the boss is pissed about you missing the meeting. The week one game consists of responding to him with either "truth" or "bluff" as he asks you questions about where you were. You'd have to be pretty much trying to screw up to lose the game altogether but the trick is to get it precisely right.

Everything is scored, you see, and you can even pick up bonus points through looking for clues in text files on the website and later, on the website's accompanying facebook and twitter pages. I'm guessing/hoping that higher scores mean extra content revealed at some point. Either way, I'm one of those points fanatics. I'm gonna keep hammering away at it until I match the listed highest possible score. I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to ways to procrastinate from my work.

What does all this add up to? An entertaining way to spend 30 minutes once a week, a fun little mystery, and a cool advance look at stuff about one of the neater looking spy thrillers on the horizon. I'll definitely be checking back in again next week for a look at mission two...