confession

[psocoptera]

I just don't *get* Myst.

Was a (birthday?) gift back in HS (had I asked for it?); got through a couple sessions back then poking around before realizing I could be having more fun playing Crystal Quest, tetris, solitaire etc.

Apparently this is still true. See, am replacing my stalwart ancientMac (who's a goood mac for making it this long, yes oo is) with Chaos's shiiiiny laptop in less than a month, and was thinking, you know, before I retire this thing from regular duty (except for Crystal Quest...), I should freakin' solve Myst, already. I'm unemployed and all...

But, like, shrug. Just spent maybe a couple hours all told, poking around the starting island, reviewing what's there, not getting any farther than I ever had before which was pretty much "ooh, gee, lots of things where I should input some numbers. whee." I suppose this is the part where I'm supposed to be all intrigued with these puzzles to solve? Maybe I'm just not that smart, or whatever, but the idea of putting god knows how much time into fucking around with what one gaming friend describes very aptly as "really poorly designed user interfaces" just makes me go enh.

I mean, for one thing, it's *slow*. I may have certain suspicions that my actions in one place may be having effects somewhere else, but if I was doing this in an rpg, the DM wouldn't keep describing the trip back and forth between known locations, he'd say "okay, you go back to the other room and...". Why can't I bookmark locations and then jump back to them from a menu instead of clicky-clicky-clicking my way back and forth? Also, why can't I pause and get back to the finder to check my email or play a badly-needed game of BreakThru for a little action? I mean, yes, this game is from the early 90s, but even in the early 90s the mighty Multifinder was able to run multiple applications at once... Also, and this is just a pet peeve, there seems to be vital audio content. and I have yet to figure out how to enable deaf-person mode so I can get subtitles and at least be listening to music or something.

Sigh. What it really boils down to is that Myst is a slooow-paced game for the patient, and I'm so not. It's like listening to someone read out loud when you know you could be reading three or four times as fast and be there already twitch twitch.

And yet despite all this I feel a perverse desire to keep poking at it in hopes that eventually something exciting will happen. I mean, all those people thought it was cool, right? It must have some redeeming features. Maybe once you get to the other Ages?

Comments

[sofer.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling - I'm trying to finish Master and Commander right now, even though I don't really like it. It's been a really slow read for me, even though I know it's the kind of book you're supposed to be able to gobble up. So many other people love them, I keep thinking it has to start being good in the next chapter! Actually, I don't think it's badly written, it's just naval battles are not my thing at all. (OTOH, I just finished the Nanny Diaries, which was lot's of fun!)

My main beef with Myst

[antimony.livejournal.com]

I played a little of the Crystal Key, and found it to be godawfully slow and terribly-interfaced, as well as having serious hunt-for-the-hotspot issues.

Myst I got when it was fairly new, and my main problem was there was no outside-the-box thinking, really. You hunt down the solution, and when you find it it's very obviously the solution, you enter it, puzzle done. That's how all puzzles are, but it's nice when they include a little bit of screwball logic or something unusual. I did manage to prove myself to be a) a visual learner and b) an old-school adventurer at one point, since there are some sound-dependent puzzles that I didn't solve that way.

(The second myst game, from the little I played, was better about that -- but I got stuck quickly and the slowness on my antiquated computer led me to put it down in favor of text adventures. I haven't played more than 5min of the third one.)

[irilyth]

Have you ever played The Fool's Errand, and/or the others of that line (whose names I've now forgotten)? They were pretty much just the puzzles, with a little bit of framing story, but it didn't get in the way much.

I've never played Myst, although I used to play what I think were similar games back in the day, like some ancient thing called ShadowGate, which at the time seemed like a graphical version of a text adventure game, and might have been among the first of them.

Do you like text adventure games? They're less about solving the kinds of puzzles in Fool's Errand (which may or may not be anything like the puzzles in Myst, now that I think about it), but they have the wandering-around-the-landscape feature, and I wonder if Myst does it that way because it's a descendant of those.

[franzeska]

Well, the second one is mostly about life ashore, as far as I remember, and I thought it was much better. The M&C series gets better as it goes along.

Re: My main beef with Myst

[franzeska]

That damned maze! I didn't figure out what the sounds were for until I read some walkthrough years later. It never occured to me that you weren't supposed to waste lots of time drawing an ugly map on your handy pad of graph paper.

I loved the second game, but it had parts that were just to tedious to bother with. I cheated massively and looked at a walkthrough.

You have been misled

[franzeska]

And yet despite all this I feel a perverse desire to keep poking at it in hopes that eventually something exciting will happen. I mean, all those people thought it was cool, right? It must have some redeeming features. Maybe once you get to the other Ages?

Nothing exciting ever happens. No. Really. Nothing.

Think of Myst not as a game but as an experience. Instead of wanting to strangle people when you hear that damned wind blowing sound, feel the bleak landscape seeping into your subconscious like bad gothic literature.

I actually liked it once I figured out how to operate the elevator. My problem with the whole game is that I sometimes tried the exact right thing and it failed to work. (Like clicking on the door of the elevator to close it and somehow missing the bit of the handle that actually made this happen and then abandoning the game for three months.)

When I played the second game, I used a walkthrough whenever I started getting bored. That worked much better. There are more characters and more random diaries and things and much more backstory that still failed to make sense if you didn't read the novels.

There are a couple of cool looking objects in Myst, but it's largely pointless to finish it if you're not enjoying it. If you really want to see the ending, just cheat and play through quickly. Do give the sequel a chance though. It's still not the type of game that everyone would like, but it fixes many of the more horrible problems from the first one.

Re: You have been misled

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

Ditto re "not a game but an experience."

Myst is really, it seems to me, two things rolled into one:

1. A visually and aurally spectacular rendering of a really cool-looking interactive environment.

2. A set of puzzles, almost all of which consist of attempting to figure out the worst-designed user interfaces ever in the history bad UI design.

I loved _Myst_ for the first thing, so it took me quite a while (possibly until around the time I finished the game) to realize that I had pretty much no interest in the second thing. Puzzles in general, I've gradually learned, don't interest me much, and puzzles that consist mostly of guessing the intentions of the worst UI designer ever are interesting to me only as an occasional student of bad UI design.

The story isn't a very good story in terms of plot; in particular, the ending pretty much sucks.

So if you're not enjoying the experience, don't subject yourself to more of it. If the lovingly detailed steampunk look and the lush sound effects don't appeal to you for their own sake, *and* you don't like the kind of puzzles they provide, then you almost certainly won't enjoy the game.

(There's also, for me, a certain amount of sense-of-wonder involved in traveling through the various Ages and so on; but that derives mostly from appreciation of the visuals and sound and atmosphere.)

...Agreed that it's unfortunate that the UI of the game itself isn't as good as it could be. Would you appreciate it more to know that it's all basically a giant Hypercard stack?

[zorblak.livejournal.com]

Ah, The Fool's Errand, one of the best computer games ever, along with 3 in 3, Cliff Johnson's other popular game. Note that both of these game (as well as At the Carnival) are available as free downloads from his web site now: http://www.fools-errand.com/. In addition, he's working on a sequel to TFE, due out on Halloween.

If you're looking for a game with excellent puzzles, and none of that annoying running around through annoying interfaces, these are the games to get.