I salvaged Myst 3: Exile many many years ago from a sales bin, tried it,
and got a bit daunted by the quite steep progress curve from the very
beginning. You could turn some weird objects and press some buttons, and
absolutely nothing seemed to happen. It seemed obscure and obfuscated.
Since then it had been sitting on my games shelf, waiting to get a chance,
while more modern games appeared alongside. So this summer I decided to
give it another go. (Yeah, this story might sound a bit familiar to some
people here. Don't worry, it won't be as long.)

  While equally daunting at first (I go walking around, turning wheels
and pressing buttons, and nothing seems to happen), but I decided that
this time I'm going to break it. There *has* to be some idea behind all
this, I just have to find it.

  Perseverance paid off, as I slowly started discovering the idea of how
things worked and how the puzzles are solved. I started making some actual
progress!

  Many times I seemed to hit an impassable wall, as nothing I tried seemed
to work, or something was just way too complicated to try to solve by
trial-and-error (eg. because of thousands of possible combinations), but
in the end I always managed to solve the problems, and clearly in the
intended ways (ie. by deducing the answers from the hints rather than
trying blindly thousands of combinations).

  I'm a bit proud to say that I completed the entire game without ever
looking at any walkthrough tutorial whatsoever. All by myself.

  I really liked the game. It's a nice change of pace compared to all the
violence-filled action games and level-grinding-filled RPGS. No pressure,
no worries, just explore and examine things at your own pace, and try to
find the subtle hints that aid in solving the puzzles. I really liked
especially that. ("I just can't figure this out. There *must* be a hint
somewhere. But where? *looks and looks* Ah! That's it. Right in front of
my eyes!")

  I liked it so much, in fact, that I ordered Myst IV (which seems to
follow the same conventions).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   I'm a bit proud to say that I completed the entire game without ever
> looking at any walkthrough tutorial whatsoever. All by myself.

Congrats. I love these types of games. It can be exceedingly difficult to do 
them without cheats, but of all the different "3D adventure games" out 
there, the Myst series is by far the best.

>   I liked it so much, in fact, that I ordered Myst IV (which seems to
> follow the same conventions).

It will make the most sense if you play Myst (the original) first. Riven 
(Myst 2) is kind of stand-alone, but is arguably the best of the series. 
There's also "True Myst", which is the original Myst ported (officially) to 
a 3D engine, so it's no longer a slide show.

I found Myst 4 to be the most difficult. Arguably the prettiest, but also 
the most difficult. There are a few things that are hard to read that you 
need to be able to read to decode some clues, and a few things where you 
have to make a leap of assumption to figure out what you're supposed to do.

It's definitely a connected story, so I'd quite recommend going through them 
in order if you can. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Riven 
> (Myst 2) is kind of stand-alone, but is arguably the best of the series. 

  I own it. Unfortunately, it seems to have gained a great instability when
running it on a modern PC. It crashes at annoyingly frequent intervals (just
a few minutes) and if it crashes while saving, the save file will become
corrupted and you will lose all your progress (unless you alternate between
two save files, in which case you will lose only the latest progress).

  I actually intended to play Riven through first, but due to this
instability it was too annoying to try. A real pity.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   I actually intended to play Riven through first, but due to this
> instability it was too annoying to try. A real pity.

Huh. I think I've played Riven (and Myst) in a VM and it worked OK. You 
might want to try that?  Or maybe run it in some sort of compatibility mode? 
It's really quite awesome.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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Warp wrote:
>   I actually intended to play Riven through first, but due to this
> instability it was too annoying to try. A real pity.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=myst&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=11798540492054256128&ei=eVBPTL2vAZT4sAOY4MmQBw&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDMQ8wIwAw#

Maybe grab yourself a newer version? Three myst games for $10? :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   I liked it so much, in fact, that I ordered Myst IV (which seems to
> follow the same conventions).

  While in Myst III there is an option to invert the mouse Y axis, there
is no such option in Myst IV. Not even though people have complained to
Ubisoft about this and pleaded for a patch which would add the feature
(both Myst III and IV are published by Ubisoft, so it seems strange that
the feature is in the former but not in the latter). Some users have even
gone so far as to demand a refund for the game if they don't fix it, but
Ubisoft's response has been basically, "we don't do refunds; we might look
at the issue of the lacking option for inverting the vertical axis, maybe".
Naturally, no such patch has ever been published. Ubisoft doesn't care.

  Maybe Ubisoft learned from people's complaints about Myst IV and avoided
the same mistake with Myst V? Nope. There is no option to invert the
vertical mouse axis in Myst V either. People have complained, a lot, and
demanded for a patch to add the option. Ubisoft is ignoring them. Nobody
can even start beginning to comprehend the reason for this. It's not like
the feature would be difficult to implement. In fact, it's one of the
easiest things one could implement in such a game, and 99.99% of games
where the mouse controls the camera offer such an option (although there
are some other games which don't either, shame on them).

  "Ok", you might say, "then just use an external software to invert the
vertical mouse axis for that game; surely Logitech has such an option in
their mouse drivers?" You would be surprised: No system software or driver,
not Windows, not Microsoft's mouse drivers, not Logitech's mouse drivers,
nothing, supports this simple feature. Logitech has a software which allows
you to bind many settings and events to different keys... except for inverting
the vertical mouse axis. No dice.

  After an extensive online search, I have found exactly *one* program which
allows you to do this (by sitting atop the actual mouse driver and inverting
the Y axis), but it's not free. You have to pay money for it.

  One single program.

  How hard can this be?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Naturally, no such patch has ever been published. Ubisoft doesn't care.

Both Myst 4 and Myst 5 have bits where it's not first person. (Or, for that 
matter, third person.)  Maybe that's the reason it wasn't in there in the 
first place?

But yeah, that does seem odd. It must already be inverted, because I don't 
remember ever being bothered by that, and I play inverted (i.e., airplane 
style).

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> But yeah, that does seem odd. It must already be inverted, because I don't 
> remember ever being bothered by that, and I play inverted (i.e., airplane 
> style).

  I would have noticed if it was inverted. It's "normal" (ie. when you push
the mouse forward, the camera turns upwards).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> But yeah, that does seem odd. It must already be inverted, because I don't 
>> remember ever being bothered by that, and I play inverted (i.e., airplane 
>> style).
> 
>   I would have noticed if it was inverted. It's "normal" (ie. when you push
> the mouse forward, the camera turns upwards).

Huh. OK. Maybe I don't get confused when it's third-person or something. 
Which is kind of funny, because the whole reason for enabling inverted mouse 
is that the center of rotation isn't at the center of control. You can 
either look at it as "mouse up moves screen contents (i.e., *character's* 
eyes) up" or "mouse up moves *player's* eyes up, hence looking down thru the 
screen."  Like in a plane, where pulling the stick back (i.e., down) moves 
the *tail* down, but since you're not in the tail, the plane goes up. If the 
tail stuck out the front of the plane like kittyhawk, nobody would have 
invented mouse invert to start with.




By the time you get to Uru, the controls are annoying as heck anyway. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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