Live from Austin!

[Very minor puzzle spoilers.]

As a piece of graphic art, Myst IV should win awards. Unfortunately, as a game it leaves rather a lot to be desired.

The most immediate problem is the speed–or rather, the lack of it. While my computer was comfortably over spec and could easily handle scrolling the screen around even with all the effects turned on, each transition to a new location involved the game freezing for a few seconds while it loaded in the next set of graphics. Usually the delay was around 4 seconds, but sometimes it was as much as 10 seconds. That’s not too bad when you’re somewhere you’ve never been before, but when you’re wandering from place to place trying to solve puzzles spread over a world, it gets tiresome very quickly.

The second problem is that even as of late 2005 and 3 patches, the game is buggy. I couldn’t persuade the mangrees to do their thing, even though I had resorted to a walkthrough and was sure I was doing what it said. I tried saving the game, quitting, restarting and loading, and suddenly the puzzle was solved. If I hadn’t been working from a walkthrough and hadn’t known the game was misbehaving, I would likely have wasted hours unable to solve that puzzle for no good reason.

The puzzles themselves aren’t as satisfying as earlier Myst games, either. Some of them make no sense at all–like stroking a snake to make a machine work. Others don’t quite work right, like the slider puzzle on the gate, abruptly making you conscious of the fact that you’re not dealing with a real physical object, but instead with a computer simulation that has extra constraints that wouldn’t be there in the real world.

In Riven, the puzzles were carefully woven into the worlds; the machinery mostly had a good reason to be there. Myst IV is more of a throwback to the original Myst, with elaborate locks in arbitrary locations, strange apparently pointless mechanisms, and worlds in an initial state that really doesn’t make sense except as a way to throw puzzles at you. To make up for this you’re given an amulet which is basically a clue machine, a rather blatant plot device which again destroyed the feeling of being in a real world.

The puzzles are also tough. When you’re forced to resort to hints, you should always think “Aha, yes, of course, I should have got that.” In the case of one of the Myst IV worlds, I still didn’t understand what was going on even after reading the solution. Combine that with the click (wait wait wait) click (wait wait wait) slowness when wandering around, and you have a recipe for frustration.

Still, the music was great–easily the most impressive soundtrack of a Myst game so far. But that wasn’t enough to overcome the defects and keep me immersed in the game.

If you’re a Myst fan, you’ll buy this anyway. If you’re not, I’d suggest that you steer clear of it and get one of the other games in the Myst series.

If you’ve played the game Riven, you might recognize this image as the view from the crater towards Gehn’s laboratory. Except that it isn’t; it’s pipework from a hydroelectric plant near Snoqualmie Falls in Washington State.

One of the interesting things about wandering the woodlands and mountains near Seattle was noticing just how much the whole area resembles the game. The wooden walkways through the woods were so Myst-like, I expected to see strange corroded metal machines. In retrospect, it’s not particularly surprising; Rand and Robyn Miller are both from Spokane, and many of the textures used in the games were obtained by travelling the west coast with a digital camera.

So until they produce a direct-to-brain full sensory interface version of Myst, a visit to Snoqualmie, Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains is highly recommended.

I have Myst III: Exile in the computer room, yet I find myself wanting to play NetHack. I suspect it’s because I can play NetHack lying in a warm bed. I could install …Exile on the ThinkPad PC, but then I’d have to use the ThinkPad nipple to navigate and my fingers would hurt after a short while.

So Apple increased the price of the iMac by $100. Combined with the $200 price gouge on RAM and a 3-5 week wait, I’ve lost my enthusiasm to spend the money right now. I think I’ll wait until the initial rush is over and the prices and delivery times return to normal.

Myst III: Exile is shipping. I will try to resist the urge to purchase it on sight. I will probably fail, because I’ve seen some movies of the gameplay.

Riven was the most beautiful piece of art I’ve ever seen on a computer. I’ve played it right through twice, and will probably go back and play it a third time. Myst III basically takes a Riven-like world and makes it fully 3D, so you can rotate to any angle. When technology advances far enough to produce fully immersive 3D worlds via neural interface, the Myst series is going to produce some serious social problems.