Have you played the games from the Myst series? What's your favorite 
age?  (Try to avoid spoilers, probably. No serious spoilers below.)

I liked Channelwood (and the path to its linking book) a lot from the 
first Myst, and the path to get to the Shipstone age on the original 
Myst island.  (I.e., Shipstone itself wasn't that great, but getting 
access to Shipstone was clever.) Selenic was kind of silly, with the 
maze and all, completely out of character I thought. I enjoyed the 
mechanical age too, just figuring out where the pages might be (spoilers 
avoided). I was kind of stuck on Myst for a while, even opening up the 
clues and going "huh?", until I realized I really needed to get my sound 
card fixed to be able to understand what the blinking "tower rotation" 
light was all about. :-)

I think Myst did a great job of driving a plot without being obnoxious 
about it. There's a natural boundary - you're on an island. You get 
suckered into it, so there's no need to accept any particular backstory: 
could have happened to anyone. It almost made sense that you'd leave the 
combination to combination locks sitting around but obsfucated (altho, 
again, why would you lock doors on an uninhabited world?).

Riven was fun, too. I liked getting into Gehn's lab, and the ride to get 
there. That, and realizing that "hey, I can actually look to see where 
the walkways go, and from that deduce where I need to go to get onto 
them." That, and of course, the circularity with Myst (intentionally 
obscured so as not to spoil it: you know what I mean). Oh, and the 
school house. Overall, quite cool! (Altho the rebel age left much to be 
desired.)

As for Exile, I think Amateria was best (the one with the rolling 
balls), both finding the book and the island itself. Possibly because I 
did that first and hence didn't expect the end, along with still being 
mildly phobic of heights and playing it late at night in the dark the 
first time. Voltaic (rocky with power supplies et al) was fun, kind of 
silly too (lava routing controls *inside* the volcano??). The very final 
age was neat too, with all the different endings. I'm not sure why it 
seemed so difficult the first time I played it and so easy the later 
time, in terms of transliterating the symbols. "There's one think I've 
learned about linking books: The doors they opened don't close behind 
you."  I'm a bit disappointed with where you don't get to go ... I can't 
figure out how to say it more clearly without spoilers.

Revelation was nice, but come on. If you could write an age, wouldn't 
you make it possible to work *both* elevators at the same time? (Yes, I 
know there aren't two elevators: If you already played it, you know what 
I mean. If you haven't played it, I've avoided spoiling it.) At least it 
was fun to see the rest of Tomata. At this point, I think the series 
started going downhill: silly puzzles having little or nothing to do 
with the story. At least Exile had a *reason* for there to be blatant 
puzzles-for-the-sake-of-puzzles. (Altho I dunno. The idea that you'd 
build a door across a bridge over a lake to keep the birds out indicates 
you're at least a bit crazy. Maybe building locks onto stuff when you 
know you're the only person in the world is just the same sort of crazy? 
But singing dieties needing help with neurosurgery?) And at least, if 
you're expected to copy characters from one place to another, don't 
compress the images so much the characters are illegible. At least they 
explained where, in the world with only 3 people, the rest of the people 
went.

Uru was pretty sucky, altho some of the effects were nice. Lousy 
puzzles, lame journals, stupid goals. Of course, it was supposed to be 
continued as an MMORPG, but it was still lame. Altho it was kind of 
cool, after reading the first Myst novel, to see some of the places 
described therein. (Not that I'd recommend the novel; it too was pretty 
awful.) I couldn't get Path of the Shell to run - something weird with 
the video driver. (In case you wonder, for example, the giant vertical 
tunnel at the end of Uru is where the heroine gets into D'ni in the 
novel, after finding geological anomolies in the desert (which you see 
at the start of Uru) caused by digging said tunnel).

I played the demo for the fifth Myst series, but I haven't bought the 
game. Anyone who has, care to comment? It looked like they couldn't 
really come up with a game idea, and I didn't really want to spend $50 
on it, but it's probably pretty cheap by now.

Compare to seventh guest (which I gave up when I realized it was all 
classic puzzles like 8 queens set in a haunted house for some reason), 
Lighthouse (which railroaded you into (say) not letting you leave the 
house before you listened to your answering machine, and otherwise was a 
stupid pixel hunt), or Schizm (which had a great premise of having two 
characters you could switch between to solve puzzles, but started out 
with you rescuing an expedition which by the end you find out never 
actually existed (what??!) and which involved absurd rituals on the part 
of the natives obviously designed to just drag out the game without 
needing to actually create more content). Longest Journey had its 
moments, but the puzzles were lame, as well as frustratingly timed 
(e.g., you have grungy clothes. You can't go into the clothes store 
because it's too expensive. You go talk to someone in the next store 
over, who points out you're improperly dressed, so *now* you can go in 
the clothes store). It was more a "string together a bunch of 
conversations with long walks between" than an actual game, altho the 
story was indeed kind of cool. Also I'll admit some of the conversations 
were excellent: "What do you mean these things crash all the time? I 
heard they were the safest mode of travel!"  "Well, sure, as long as 
you're not flying one. They almost never land on pedestrians." I think 
there were maybe three puzzles in the whole game I had to think about, 
but dozens of times where the right thing to do was obvious, but I 
hadn't triggered the game into letting me do it *yet*.

So have you played the fifth Myst game? Have you played something else I 
haven't mentioned?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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