October 14, 2000

10:35 PM

Myst, in an actual 3d environment. Or so they say. Having no 3d card, I can't check it out.
posted by alan (29 comments total)

A rumor I've heard about this is that, even though it's realtime 3D, the puzzles are exactly the same as the original game - no differences. So how much more fun it might be is anyone's guess, but I think the "3Dness" novelty might wear off pretty quick. (Although I'll probably still buy it 'cause I'm a sucker for this sort of thing).
posted by kokogiak at 10:47 PM on October 14, 2000

I never liked Myst, not even the slightest bit. The only way I could ever describe this game is boring. A good video game is one that makes you want to play it again as soon as you wake up the next day. This is something Myst doesn't even come close to doing for me. I'm simply glad it came free with my computer, instead of me wasting money on it. Come to think of it, I've always had this weird opposition to playing games on a PC; never was able to get into it and probably never will be able to. Consoles are a different story however; as a kid I was a Nintendo junkie, and I still intend on getting either PSX2 or the XBox.
posted by tomorama at 11:08 PM on October 14, 2000

avault.com is one of a few sites that use the "Your download will begin in x seconds" while they force a commercial down your neck. Aren't their annoying ad banners enough? I really hope shit like this doesn't catch on. Imagine going to every news site and being forced to sit through a 30 second flash commercial before you can retrieve the article. Maybe it hasnt happened because broadband is at enough homes yet.
posted by skallas at 11:18 PM on October 14, 2000

Most of the major download networks like tucows and download.com do it. The people who run these places are not web developers who share a common love for the potential of the net. They are businessmen who want to suck it dry for every dollar they can get. There's no other big reason besides money that every commercial, tv show and movie has a dot com these days. If they couldn't make money off it, they wouldn't be here.
posted by tomorama at 11:28 PM on October 14, 2000

This is a mixed-economy, capitalistic country after all.
posted by tomorama at 11:29 PM on October 14, 2000

I know that, my point is many sites get by just with just banner ads and turn a profit and keep things moving speedily along. This 'pause while we play a commercial' is television style advertising that isn't appropriate with the web. The opposite would be to to letterbox your TV and stream ad banners in the black spaces AND watch commercials. I'm sure you wouldn't like that. I'm not paying $40 a month for broadband so you can port TV commercials and send them down my wire just because you can.

Consumers should have a voice in how much advertising is shoved down their throats, and I think avault is pushing the limits. I'm sure if enough people wrote and said they think the forced commercial watching turns them off from the site and will go to a competitor who doesn't do the same, we might see some positive results.

Capitalism is a double-edged sword, when consumers move away from a company whose practices they don't like and to another they tolerate its best for all concerned. Incidentaly, my homepage has an ad blocking hosts file for dialup users who are constantly downloading ad banners.

posted by skallas at 1:17 AM on October 15, 2000

i'm with tomorama on this one...even when the first version was a week old it bored me to death...why any more versions are needed is a MYSTery to me...

i always thought someone should build a quake level based on myst island, where instead of solving puzzles you use a rocket launcher....if i want to solve puzzles i'll read Plato or Nietzsche and ponder life while expresso raises my heart-rate.
posted by th3ph17 at 2:18 AM on October 15, 2000

Tucows does a ten second wait too. Just ensure that you don't download the ads, it's your bandwidth.
posted by holloway at 5:58 AM on October 15, 2000

Geez, I don't understand you people. Do you expect a free lunch everytime? How do you think Tucows and download.com pay for the servers that hold the files that you download and the bandwidth they use to transfer them?? Sun Solaris servers and OC-3 lines aren't exactly cheap you know. =P
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 9:38 AM on October 15, 2000

well, first things first
avault is quite possibly THE worst gaming site out there. with bland reviews, a layout that makes your spine hurt, and a hard to use interface, I'm suprised it's still around. I do agree that they need money, but they already have not one, but two banner ads on each page, which makes 3 on that download thing. Who clicks on the download banners anyways? Just click continue. Stupid avault...
I look forward to this myst rerelease though, last time I played it I was too freaked out to play (I guess I was 10?). Let's see if I can do it right this time...
posted by starduck at 10:00 AM on October 15, 2000

PWA: Well taking your line of thought, should I also buy the occasional thing through banner ads? I mean we're talking about supporting the long-term interests of the download site right?

Bah.

I don't buy anything from banners, why should I download them? After all, I hear Sun Solaris servers and OC-3 lines are expensive ;)

Again, it's my bandwidth. Many banners are 30k a pop, it's awfully slow on my shoddy dialup, and I could be using a text-only browser for all they know (should I donate money for using their site if I only use text-only browsers?).

Bah humbug!
posted by holloway at 10:10 AM on October 15, 2000

I loved Myst. I don't have patience for those games where you go rocketing around some virtual world so fast you can't actually see what's there. To me that is boring and largely pointless; besides which (or perhaps mostly because) I don't seem to have the dexterity to make an avatar run and jump and kill things fast enough to stay alive. Or maybe it's just that I don't have the insane level of devotion necessary to learn how.

Myst was wonderful. It was another world, perfused with that sense of exploration and wonder that made some of the old text adventures so much fun - but with gorgeous graphics and an immediately perceivable command language to make the illusion the more complete. After I'd played the game through a few times, I used to occasionally go back just to wander around Channelwood or something, just because it was a neat place.

I can't actually try out the demo, because (contrary to the spirit of the original Myst) it doesn't run on anything but Windows. The screenshots suggest that a lot of the "photorealistic" detail has been lost in the conversion. The ship's wooden beams are flat, the rocks are a bit too smooth, and the vases are sort of oddly floating over their shadows... it's all being rendered as a big mess of triangles through a 3d card, and it shows.

In another five years, perhaps, CPUs will be fast enough that this sort of thing will actually work.

-Mars

posted by Mars Saxman at 11:31 AM on October 15, 2000

A friend of mine, who's a Myst freak, downloaded the realMYST test and is in love with it. With a 750 mhz processor and a Voodoo 3, the realMYST test looked vividly similar to the original game with the additional freedom of being able to look all around the world.

He claims that this realMYST test is closer to the visions that the creators of Myst had originally seen. You contine to move around the world by pointing where you want to go and click, but you are free to stop part way and look up and around the rooms and worlds.

I, myself, was quite in awe as well with the realMYST test. I will be looking forward to seeing what other adventure games may end up using the 3d engine that this game is using.
posted by crog at 12:03 PM on October 15, 2000

What a cool popup on that link. I think I ought to do that myself...
posted by davidgentle at 4:01 PM on October 15, 2000

Isn't Myst one of the top selling games of all time?

It may not be for everyone, but nothing is. While I play games like Unreal, I am very much looking forward to this. I wish there were more games of it's kind. I found to be the closest thing to a dream visually that I have experienced in a gaming enviroment. It's beautiful and surreal.




posted by lucien at 4:44 PM on October 15, 2000

Myst was a nice idea, but Riven was beautifully realized. Very enthralling. Some of the puzzles in Myst were arbitrarily difficult -- Riven's puzzles were really well integrated into the process of exploration.
posted by sudama at 10:32 AM on October 16, 2000

That verifies my theory that games like Myst appeal to non-gamers. I was so glad to see the adventure game industry bite the big one in the early 90's. Myst is an attempt at a comeback to inane puzzle games. My worst fear is that this game will boost the genre's popularity again and we might see a Sierra revival of their horrible games.

After all Myst and Deer Hunter are some of the best selling games of all time. That and the fact that Home Alone was the biggest grossing movie of all time goes to show that the majority of people like crap or that Satan is making a good buisness buying souls.
posted by john at 11:36 AM on October 16, 2000

Myst is an attempt at a comeback to inane puzzle games. My worst fear is that this game will boost the genre's popularity again and we might see a Sierra revival of their horrible games.

Myst is about five years old now. If an adventure game revival were going to happen, it would have probably begun happening already.

the fact that Home Alone was the biggest grossing movie of all time

According to worldwideboxoffice.com, Home Alone is number 14 with a $533 million gross. Number one is held by Titanic with $1.8 billion, a truly sickening number. Not that any of this has anything to do with the relative qualities of various movies or games, of course, but I'm a little annoyed at your apparent belief that "gamers" are more important than us "non-gamers", so I felt like being pedantic. :-)

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 1:13 PM on October 16, 2000

Mars,

If you are gamer, production trends that favor non-gamers is bad. I see your point, but I am long standing gamer type that has been hooked since the first time I played on the Odyssey machine. I am glad that Myst didn't stick and Riven bombed, but the fear remains.

I don't doubt that Titanic beat Home Alone. I think I heard that it was at the top for some period of time, but the quality thing remains ( even though I have not watched Titanic) true.

Kokogiak,

I'm just calling it like I see it and the generalization that 'most people like crap' has yet to be disproved. The things that attracted you and others to Myst are not what the majority of gamers look for. I can understand why you liked Myst. It's the same reason you were able to stay awake (which I could not manage) while playing the Thief games. Your saving grace is Half-life so you have one foot in the gaming door.

I will go ahead and make another generalization. The more rabid a gamer one is the less likely they will enjoy games like Myst.


posted by john at 3:50 PM on October 16, 2000

Glad that I'm at least allowed the saving grace of Half Life. And, John, I'm inclined to agree with your final generalization, whether I like it or not. Free speech is a lovely thing, no?
posted by kokogiak at 4:39 PM on October 16, 2000

The more rabid a gamer one is the less likely they will enjoy games like Myst.

Wow, John, that's a horrendously narrow viewpoint. I counter, and suggest that the more rabid a gamer one is the more likely they are to enjoy all games, not just ones that fall within their preferred genre.

I'm a gamer, I'm a hardcore gamer. I've passed up sex (actually did last night!) to play video games, I'm that kind of a gamer.

I don't like Myst, myself. Not because of it's environment, or it's genre though. I enjoyed playing it, my problem with it is that I chomped through the game in less than 20 hours, and was pissed off at the waste of 80 bucks (CDN) on it. "Hardest Game Ever!" my ass. A comparable title that I still haven't finished (stupid microscope Othello-like puzzle pissed me off to no end), and loved, is 7th Guest.

A gamer will play games regardless of genre, or will play games only in one genre, it doesn't matter. A gamer can have a stoked, tweaked, super-system with the latest 3d accelerator and a Celeron 300A overclocked to 1GHZ (hyperbole; deal.) playing inside a freezer room. Or they'll have an Atari 2600 still, and waste hours of their life playing Hero.

Being a gamer isn't about elitism, man. It's about enjoying the form of entertainment we enjoy most.
posted by cCranium at 5:58 AM on October 17, 2000

I'm not talking about elitism. I'm talking about games with real gameplay value. Myst is a multimedia puzzle book pretending to be a game. I do play all types of games, but I refuse to allow Myst that qualification.
posted by john at 11:30 AM on October 17, 2000

Okay, I'll get off my anti-elitism high horse now.

I don't understand why though. Puzzles are games, too, and multimedia puzzle books are games. Ever read Games magazine? It's all a big puzzle book, but it's a game.

And "gameplay value" is a tremendously subjective term. I don't think that Quake single-player has a whole lot of gameplay value, I only play it for the mulitplayer aspect, but it's still a game.

From a Dictionary.com search on 'game':
1. An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime: party games; word games.
posted by cCranium at 12:43 PM on October 17, 2000

john, you're playing tricks with definitions. Myst is a game. If you don't like it, that's fine, but don't say it's not a game just because it's not the kind of game you like. That's silly and it destroys the meaning of words. If people play it, it's a game.

Myst obviously has real gameplay value for the people who enjoy it, or they wouldn't bother. That you are not one of those people does not mean they don't exist.

Why is it that the games you like are the ones with "real gameplay value", while the games you don't like (specifically Myst) are merely pretending to be games? Isn't that a bit arbitrary? The only name you mention with approval, "Half-life", looks to me like yet another boring-as-hell run-jump-kill-die 3D gunfest and no fun at all. Different preferences for different types - stop ragging on the rest of us.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 12:59 PM on October 17, 2000

"A competitive activity or sport in which players contend with each other according to a set of rules: the game of
basketball; the game of gin rummy. "

This part seems more accurate. From the part you refer reading a book could be considered a game. I don't consider puzzles games in the same way I don't see riddles as games.

I don't believe I have been raggin on anyone, only things. I don't see how my opinion on what constitutes a game or a good game has to with what I think about people. Unless you want to play a logic game and say "John thinks object A is crap, I like object A, John thinks I like crap, well f-you John!"

The definitions of words get diluted and changed all the time. I do like to play devil's advocate a bit. I like to toss around the arguement about what is considered a sport (baseball vs darts, etc.)
posted by john at 2:58 PM on October 17, 2000

I don't really think you're raggin' on anyone John, I just think you're wrong. :-)

I don't think you're wrong about Myst being crap (well, kind of, but that's completely subjective, if you didn't like it you didn't like it, and who am I to say otherwise).

I do think you're wrong about it not being a game, and about it, and games like it, being detrimental to gaming as a whole.
posted by cCranium at 3:51 PM on October 17, 2000

A least we got that settled...

It's detrimental in the same way that I see the rise of pop groups like n'sync being bad for the music industry as a whole.
posted by john at 4:10 PM on October 17, 2000

Is solitaire a game? It's not a game by that definition.
posted by davidgentle at 6:15 PM on October 17, 2000