The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

now that the series has been concluded, and that elusive ending finally written, let us appreciate the myst games properly!

spoilers for myst V: end of ages are absolutely prohibited. seriously, i'll convince one of the mods to ban you i am so not kidding. don't do it. speaking in incredibly vague terms is alright, but use caution and tact please! for example:

the monumental scope of myst V makes me tremble. i have just started playing and many things have thus far been left tantalizingly unclear. many of the steps the game takes are over familiar ground but now i feel i am being shown deeper secrets than were previously clear.

discussions of prior games in the series - including riven, the greatest adventure game ever made, and uru and its expansions - is fine. comparisons of cyan's and ubisoft's myst episodes is acceptable but will likely bear predictable conclusions.

quoting zarf earns you bonus points.

so! myst! riven! appreciate!
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[Szczepaniak]

Two questions:

1) Didn't they make a sequel called Pyst?

2) Is it worth playing Myst V if you've never played any of the other Myst games? It all sounds fascinating. Though, tbh, having only lived on consoles, I've never actually even read a review of Myst.

I think I may need to make amends.

Write an article for TGQ!

[Lackey]

How is Real Myst? Has anyone played it? It was supposed to be a version of Myst that used a real time 3D engine (some incarnation of the Quake engine?) instead of pre-rendered images.

One of my fondest family memories is playing through Riven and Myst 3 with my sister. I don't think we actually beat Riven, in hindsight. Anyway, it was some good bonding. We took turns at the actual controls, and the other person took notes and gave advice. I seriously think the Myst games are best enjoyed with other people. There's something about the elation of getting through a particularly hard puzzle, or the epiphany that reveals the solution to you, that seems much sweeter when you have someone to share it with you.

I played Uru briefly, but not online. It seems like it would have been pretty interesting. I intended to buy it but just never got around to it. Now I am highly intrigued with Myst V.

Also, quite some time ago when I read the Myst books I had a dream there was a game where you actually wrote ages using something like a gesture system to make different symbols. The symbols defined things like climate, terrain, flora, fauna, etc. Once you wrote an age you could go through and explore it. It was really cool! I was pretty upset to discover it didn't exist when I woke up.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[ApM]

I actually own Pyst. It's by the short-lived development house Parroty Software, that also put out Star Warped (which was vastly superior, though still, you know, stupid). Though it stars John Goodman, it's really terrible. I was hoping there'd be, like, some puzzles or something, but it's just a series of "postcards" that you click on to make stupid things happen. You can exhaust its possibilities completely within 15 minutes.

I started a game of Riven, for the first time, the day that Cryo laid everybody off. I stayed up til about 2am playing it, without really being sure that I'd solved a single puzzle.

[Lackey]

This seems to be a decent analysis of Pyst. Sort of a reflection of CD-ROM multimedia games from the era, really.

Curious that the project was apparanly lead by one of the guys from this 1970s comedy group called Firesign Theater. My dad recently gave me a Firesign Theater tape which I've been listening to in the car. I'm not sure I understand it, I feel like I miss many of the cultural references.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[SuperWes]

[Swimmy]

I've been trying to get ahold of the Myst Trilogy package that's around, but it's surprisingly hard to find. (I have to wait a couple weeks anyway since Katamari and the DQ8 preorder sapped up all my gaming funds.) I've played Riven on the Playstation, but I was too young to get what was going on. Aderack repeatedly compares it to Metroid Prime, which would probably make it on my Top Favorite Games list simply for what it does with the world. So this is obviously something I need to play. Oh, poverty.

[dessgeega]

[dessgeega]

...and...it turns out the final myst game may be cyan's final game. all of cyan's staff except rand miller and tony fryman have been laid off, and the development house has no money to fund any future products.

maybe the ending has been written.

here's a bug-related warning to anyone playing myst V: absolutely do not write anything on a slate that doesn't look like it's obviously supposed to go there. (you'll know what i'm talking about soon after you start the game.) the writing-recognition system is too lenient, and may interpret the wrong symbol as the right one and...allow you to finish an age prematurely. it's happened to a few people, and it happened to me, and i'm probably going to restart my game because of it. so. resist any urges to scribble on that slate.
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[ajutla]

Thing with Riven is, the game world is Fucking Perfect. And I mean it. I have never seen anything that touches it. Riven has a geography, and a culture, and a language, and a people. Nothing is out of place. There are no discrete puzzles. Instead, you're dropped into the world, you poke around, you come to understand the way it works, and then suddenly you're...advancing. You solve puzzles without really noticing you're solving puzzles. You could take anyone, even--maybe especially--someone who is completely unfamiliar with videogames, drop that person into Riven, and if they play long enough, they will understand. There are no bizarre leaps of gamey logic that ever have to be made. It's just Riven and you.

Something like Metroid Prime works on a similar level - the creatures you kill are real creatures living in real habitats; none of the areas you explore are very contrived. Still, Prime has the trappings of a videogame - you run around and shoot shit and look at a heads-up-display while doing it. Riven (aside from an inventory bar which contains all of ONE ITEM for most of the game) does none of that.

But, yeah. My love for Riven above other games is extreme and disproportionate.

I would recommend playing Myst before getting into it, however. It gives you background, for one, sets up a contrast, for another, and, well, I really like it. Even though Riven is easily the superior game, Myst...affected me more, somehow, when I played it. And It ain't as contrived as most would have you believe. Though do yourself a favor and go ahead and find a walkthrough once you get to Channelwood.

And Exile is not very interesting, for reasons I probably don't need to get into. And Revelation actually makes me extremely angry. It was by the Splinter Cell team, you know!

With luck, I should be getting into End of Ages this weekend.

And I really do plan on writing something lengthy and masturbatory about Myst.
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[dessgeega]

the wooden toy in the school in riven is the single most perfect game object ever created. you know what i'm talking about, ajutla.

ubi's myst episodes were interesting diversions but miss the point, for the most part. myst V, though... it's not riven, but it's looking pretty good, so far. i ran into what looked like an arbitrary barrier, and said, "curses! an arbitrary barrier." then i looked closer and said, "is this seemingly-arbitrary barrier what i think it is?" and then i said "if that is what i think it is, then if i do this, something should happen." and i did, and the barrier had been removed.

in contrast to myst IV, which - despite improvements over ubi's prior effort - was still a set of combination locks.

ajutla, i think you'll like myst V, but please: heed my warning about the slates! i'd hate to see you accidentally skip a whole bunch of stuff.

ADDENDUM: channelwood is actually the least-arbitrary part of the original myst, i think. i sort of think it prefigured much of riven! though its upper portions were needlessly convoluted.
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[Lackey]

I would like to add a further vouching for the wooden toy as best game object ever.

I remember when me and my sister figured out what it was. Its just one of those moments.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[ajutla]

That toy - yeah. I just felt an actual, honest-to-God frisson thinking about it. That doesn't normally happen to me.

About Channelwood - all I know is that somehow I managed to intuit my way through all of Myst, aside from the second level of Channelwood where I spent an amount of time so ridiculously long I'm embarassed to recount it here looking for that randomly-placed lever in an equally randomly-placed hut.

Maybe it was just my bad luck.
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[dessgeega]

channelwood:

bottom = yay!

top = nay!
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[simplicio]

I bought Myst 4 (sorry, IV) shortly after it came out largely cause it included Exile too. Then I got it home and thought "shouldn't I play through the 3rd one first?" So I tried and failed entirely. I think the presence of so many other games available on that HDD made it impossible to slow down and focus and play a Myst game, which is kinda interesting cause I was much better at playing Syberia during the same period. Maybe it's cause Myst doesn't really have much in the way of characters (and when it does, they're the worst part and you want them to go away as quickly as possible), and you're left with environment and books, and you don't even have an avatar that says witty things to amuse you. I think it may require seclusion, just like any deep reading does. So maybe I'll find a copy of Riven and install the whole series on a laptop in a completely different room, so I can really focus and have a physical space to support that mindset.

PS: What would happen if you took that other avatarless genre, the FPS (brought to my thinking by the bodyless Gordon Freeman), and replaced most of the puzzles with combat, but of a very alienating variety (again, drawing from HL2, where the headcrab zombies were really the most powerfully moving victims/villains I've ever encountered). If you limited the human contact, ala Myst, to provide more of a sense of isolation than camaraderie, could you subvert the idea and feeling of 'one man against the world' heroism to something entirely more lonely and reflective?

[Lackey]

[dessgeega]

what i like about myst is that it is a game about poking through the books and journals of others, and it practically requires you to keep a journal of your own.

i have six pages of notes for myst V so far. well, half-pages, and i write big.
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[kingmobster]

One of my greatest achievements as a gamer is that I actually finished Riven without the help of any walkthrough/cheat at all. I am really proud of that. I started playing it with a few friends but they finished it without me (and with the help of a walkthough I might add ...).

Riven took me eight months to finish. There were times when I didn´t play it for weeks, but instead just looked through my notes and drawings.

I didn´t like Myst much and Myst 3 was a disaster. The thing that kept me playing Riven was the fact that you don´t jump from one age to another all the time. You need to look on the islands as a whole. In the interview with Rand Miller in Edge 154 he says he wishes that they hadn´t made Riven that difficult, that the player has to make too strong mental leaps to solve some puzzles (the colored marbles for instance). He says that the world spanning puzzles were the biggest mistakes they made and that puzzles that are contained in one age is the perfect formula. The thing is that the puzzles are contained in Riven - the islands are connected. For instance, you look at and listen to an animal on one island, then use that knowledge to solve something somewhere else. My favorite moment is when I realized the cave opening on the first island has the shape of a frog and the spinning ball a few screens away is its eye. That was magical. Realizing what information is important and where is the key to solving the game.

[dessgeega]

cyan is good at creating these moments of epipheny - when disparate information comes together in your mind and produces a solution that must be right.

that being said i'm currently stuck at the end of one of myst V's ages and i'm trying very hard not to look at a hint.
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[Tablesaw]

I consider Myst to be the most boring thing I've ever had on my computer.

I played Riven a bit, and it seemed mildly intriguing, but never enough to make me want to come back to it.
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It's the saw of the table!

[dessgeega]

i...finished myst V.

i...feel betrayed.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

So I'm going through an old Xbox Nation magazine I found in my room from June-July 2003 wherein Tim Schaffer is interviewed and he says he thinks Myst killed off the adventure genre because it was so hugely popular when it came out and spawned enough copycats to successfully make sure no other real adventures games got made ever again. I am paraphrasing a bit but this is pretty much what he said.

Agree/Disagree?

[Lackey]

Is "best game in ages" a play on words?
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dessgeega]

[Mr. Mechanical]

He means that tons of people lost money trying to copy the Myst formula and failed by making terrible Myst clones that didn't sell so everybody started declaring the genre dead.

[SuperWes]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Lackey]

You know I seem to remember reading an interview with another adventure game developer (I think it was Ron Gilbert? Maybe?) who blamed Myst for the abstraction of puzzles in adventure games. I mean like making them into detatched moving widget around puzzles. I think Riven is pretty good about this actually.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dessgeega]

[Mister Toups]

But the dialog and fetch questing in games like Monkey Island are humorous and witty.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[dessgeega]

[dark steve]

I think that's past the point where our good friend Tim was working on them.

PLAY PSYCHONAUTS

[Mr. Mechanical]

Yeah, Psychonauts puts the fun back into dialogueing with NPCs and fetch questing.

Really.

[Tablesaw]

[dessgeega]

it's worth mentioning that monkey island 2 has the best ending ever.

(unlike myst V!)
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[dhex]

was it that bad?
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[ApM]

Tim Schafer has also said that graphics killed adventure games. I tried to find the interview where he says that, actually, Zelda killed adventure games, because it achieved the adventure gaming ideal far better than actual adventure games did. People should just stop asking Tim Schafer what killed adventure games, I think.

NPCs aren't inherently buckets of fetch-questing, you know. It's just bad design to always say, "It's a person! He must want something!", and most adventure games are filled to bursting with bad design. The only fetch-questing NPCs that I can think of in Psychonauts were in the wargaming level, and they were intentionally two-dimensional.

Apropos of nothing: Has anyone played Bone? The demo is way too short, and has a thoroughly unnecessary action sequence. Still, I'm intrigued.

[Mister Toups]

The entire milkman level was a brilliant take on the fetch-questing phenomenon.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[ApM]

The milkman level made me ecstatic to be alive.

[dessgeega]

ooh, there's a demo for bone? i will download immediately.
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[ajutla]

I liked Curse of Monkey Island a hell of a lot. I played it shamelessly, with a walkthrough, and enjoyed the game for reasons that have pretty much nothing to do with the actual game.

Grim Fandango is probably the best game that I find obnoxiously unplayable. It's very charming. I want to play it. I just....can't!
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[Tablesaw]

[ajutla]

[dessgeega]

[SuperWes]

I'll ask this: does someone wake up from a deep sleep in which all of the Myst games have taken place? Now THAT would be a "fuck you." (I'm talking to you Mario 2!)

-Wes
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[dessgeega]

I'M NOT GIVING WHAT I HAVE LEFT TO THAT CATERWAULIN' HOBO.

you know, as a fan of bone (i've read the whole series), i'm kind of appalled. the demo indicates this game contains all the worst aspects of point-and-click adventure games. characters repeat the same lines over and over. and the locust scene, where the brothers are seperated, putting in motion all that follows, has become a cheap action sequence over repeating landscape. and if you get overwhelmed by the locusts - which is what happens, really - you have to play it again from the beginning. as the other characters repeat their same lines over and over again.

I'M NOT GIVING WHAT I HAVE LEFT TO THAT CATERWAULIN' HOBO.
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[ApM]

Well. Yeah.

The graphic adventure community could really stand to learn a thing or seventy from the interactive fiction community.

[Lackey]

At least that Bone is being made with the direct involvement of the creator, so its not like they're going to damage the IP or anything.

On a slightly topical note I think Monkey Island 4 had better looking scenery than 2. 2 had very early scanned paintings...and they looked kind of like really compressed GIFs. I don't respect that article.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dessgeega]

i thought 2 was gorgeous.

i mean.

woodtick?
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[Lackey]

It was surely okay! But the point is that the backgrounds in Monkey Island 2 were to 2D game art what early textured 3D was to 3D game art.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |