Patrick Elliott wrote:
> "Oh, good.. Another Myst clone,

Yeah, for a while, there were a whole *bunch* of Myst clones that really 
sucked rather hard. I think both Lighthouse and Schism fell into that 
description.

Lighthouse sucked because if you're going to make an adventure game, you 
really need to be rather open and sandboxy about the environment. Making an 
intestinal adventure game really just is silly. For example, I spent the 
first 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get out of the house. It 
wouldn't let me leave until I listened to the answering machine message. Not 
any message or hint or anything so crass. It just wouldn't interact with the 
door until you listened to the machine. Then the front door the same thing, 
but you had to take the umbrella. And so on.

schism had a novel idea - you start with two characters, and you have to 
help each other out at various points, switching between viewpoints. Except 
that the game starts with you going to a place to rescue the science team 
that was sent there to investigate the alien artifacts, and it ends with you 
finding out there was never a science team and it was all a ploy by the 
aliens to get you to get from where you landed to where they are. Huh? The 
boss that sent you on an interstellar rescue mission didn't know there 
wasn't anyone there to rescue? As soon as they made you run back and forth 
across the world full of slow, over-compressed quicktime events due to (I'm 
trying to remember the exact term here, but it was something like) "ritual 
deception" or some such, I knew it wasn't going to get any better. When it 
became impossible to solve one of the puzzle because the compression was so 
bad you couldn't read the combination you were supposed to plug in 
elsewhere, I just cheated my way thru. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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