In article <475cd321@news.povray.org>, dne### [at] sanrrcom says...
> 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?
> 
Hmm. I would have to look at various images to figure out which ones in 
"each" game really. Think Channelwood was nice in the original. Not sure 
in a lot of the others. Now, in Uru, I would have to say Gahreesen. Mind 
you, all of them in that one are just incredible, even by Myst's 
standards, but its just insane to climb up through all the bits of the 
insides, where you arrive, only to find yourself standing on the top of 
a platform that is like 400 feet or more in diameter, and slowly 
rotating around the center of the ages, like a giant top, and 
occasionally lining up with another structure, which you jump to, that 
starts out so far away you *literally* can't tell how big it really is 
at first. Its just jaw dropping.

The other ages are, to varying degrees, similarly unbelievable.

Oh, and for anyone that doesn't know, they reopened Uru: Live a while 
back. You can now go in there with other people again, and I believe the 
are adding new puzzles and things to it as well.

To get some idea of what the stuff in it looks like, for those that 
don't know, check out the Dn'i Explorer's guild, which has screen shots:

http://www.uruexplorers.com/reference/dni/locations.php

Or here for some screensavers from it:

http://www.uruexplorers.com/about/downloads.php

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

Post a reply to this message