Hello everyone, and welcome back to a shiny new puzzle from your dear friend Kappei!

This time I'm celebrating not one, not two, but THREE happy events! And that's without counting Christmas and the new Year!

On the 4th of December it's been my birthday, in a few days it will be my 2nd anniversary on SG, but most important of all, in a few days I'll be dad for the second time!

Join the party with me by destroying your brain with this little puzzle I've done:

http://itstoohard.com/puzzle/y25jqWIL

As usual, no spoilers, no suggestions, no cooperation. If you're stuck I'll try to help. Please, please, PLEASE, don't post replies like "I'm stuck at x", "What can I do to solve y". Let me direct you to zelghadis' awesome guide to puzzle solving: pure awesomeness

EDIT: forgot to put the credits where credit is due... This puzzle couldn't have been possible without the help of a very good friend :)

EDIT 2: The puzzle is now complete! Happy hunting!

EDIT 3 (please read if you're stuck): I'm an idiot. The elusive missing piece was actually missing. As usual it's not a puzzle of mine if I don't make some kind of major mistake. The puzzle can actually be solved now. Sorry guys.

EDIT 4: Christmas is getting closer, so I'm feeling generous. The missing piece should be easier to find now. It's still in the old place, but now there's another copy somewhere else.

HINT 1: still looking for something? are you sure you searched everywhere? are you sure you're searching for the right thing? TRY AGAIN!

HINT 2: SERIOUSLY. Start from the beginning once more if you're stuck. There's surely something you've missed.

HINT 3: (I really hope this is the last). Take the missing piece. It's kinda pretty to look at.bash your head on it a little. Tenderize it. Found the hidden meaning? :D

--------------------------]#@§gxç°°§bv°m----MPORTANT COMMUNIC#@[ç秧---asfdsf:é°§°:V;§çxcv---DON'T DRINK AND DR°çéélkdsnfsdsdlksdnfl----FILES AND RANKS ARE INVERTED.°çé{*°---][dopasfOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBzxsdgzosdigzs}{@òèòà--- REPEAT: FILES AND RANKS ARE INVERTED. END COMMUafnonfsùòèàò{@èà@ù---------------

SOLUTION:

STEP 1

The starting point was the itstoohard quiz. You had to find the titles of the games(solution).
Some of you got it by simply recognizing the games, and I congratulate with you for the incredible eyesight and detail recognization, but there was an easier way:
the images are hosted on imgur and each one of them had the solution written in the description!
By solving this step you were rewarded with a Serious Sam HD double pack.

STEP 2

As I hinted in the SS GA, the puzzle was not over! The images on imgur were hiding another secret: each of their titles was the link to another image (kitties!) that, in turn had a single letter as a title.
By taking those letters in the order of the original images on itstoohard, you would have obtained a link to a giveaway for Dishonored.

STEP 3

Hidden in the description of the giveaway there was a link to an image. Apparently there was nothing wrong with this image, but it was hiding a dark secret.
By opening it with a Zip File Manager (Winzip, Winrar, 7Zip...) you would have found an image hidden inside.
OMG! All those QRs! Should we bruteforce those?!? Of course not! I'm not that evil! (even if some of you bruteforced them anyway)
Did you wonder why there was an annoying girl constantly advertising her own puzzle every now and then? Because we were pointing out that our puzzles were linked! Each of Misskpavd locks was hiding the instructions to rebuild a QR code.
I invite you to read her solution to discover everything you may have missed. But then there was a problem... half of the pieces were missing! The solutions hinted at a "second board", but where was it hidden?

STEP 4

This step, due to a combination of incompetence on my part and bad luck, has been the hardest for many of you. The White Pawn image, that was hiding the second chessboard, was hidden in the main thread.
Not in the main post itself but in one of my comments. I made a mistake at first, so it was invisible for everyone, but because of a bad positioning, many of you missed it even after I fixed the link, so I had to move it to an easier to find place, the main post.
The string you had to find and decode was "ollprmtulihlnvgsrmtwlgxlnhozhsbR9Zw". It was codified in Atbash (see hint #3) and, when decoded, would read "lookingforsomethingdotcomslashyI9Ad". The last five characters were the link to a Sleeping Dogs giveaway, that was hiding in the description the White Pawn image.

STEP 5

Tired? We're not there yet! The 16 QRs, when decoded, had links for various content. 5 of those were tied to KayKay's puzzle: 3 nonogram's pieces (one was a red herring) ad two giveaways. The other 11 were mine and each one of them had a 2 characters description.
To get to the next step you had to realize something: those beginning with a number were in sequential order. The other three? red herrings :P (one of those contained the elusive 12th key for Kay's puzzle).
So now you have a 8-chars string. Itstoohard? WRONG! It was a link to pastebin!

STEP 6

Last step, I promise! The monstrosity on pastebin, encoded in Base64 was nothing else that an mp3 file! You could realize it by decoding it by text and noticing the ID3 tag at the beginning.
Here is a tool to get a working file from a base64 string (bookmark it! :P)
Hidden in the file in various ways there were the last five characters for the final giveaway: the first one was the title of the song, the second was written in the file via notepad, surrounded by a fence of "#" signs, the third was the "noise" in the middle of the song (you could read it by viewing the spectrogram, for example, with Audacity), the fourth and fifth were hidden as a zip file in the same way the chessboards where hidden in the pawn images, but you could read them too even by opening the file with a text editor and scrolling to the end. Some of you bruteforced the characters they were missing, but I'm fine with that, you already had to pass through that pain before :D
Putting them in order, you'd get Bioshock Infinite!

That's it, I hope you had fun... Feel free to ask for clarifications/insult me, I'll leave the thread open.

Thank you for participating and above all thanks toKayKay that helped me in making this puzzle possible. Remember to wish her a Happy birthday on the 18th!