Carpe Datum

Exile

I guess yesterday was post #1000, which was an anniversary of sorts. Oh well.

A long time ago, a person I know very well wrote a couple of hint guides for Myst and Riven. One of them is linked here and hosted by one of Cyan's official web pages. For the life of me, I can't remember where the Riven Hint Guide ended up, though there is still a German version online. For all I know, maybe the English version vanished into the ether (I'm sure it still exists on a hard drive somewhere). The two hint guides moved from host to host for several years, each time the host would die one of those unexpected (and yet entirely expected) Internet domain deaths. I --, uh, the author never wanted to host them, because he had no idea whether he could afford it or not, and didn't want to go to the bother.

In those early days of the web, those two guides got tons of hits. This journal probably gets an average of 30-50 unique visitors per day. The hint guides used to get thousands, and that was seven or eight years ago. But that was before the days of goooooogle ads and so forth, and so the author never made any money off the guides. He did get some free stuff after meeting Robyn and Rand Miller (of Cyan), which was cool, and some recognition on their web site, but that was about it. Anyway, the hint guides are obsolete now that places like this have popped up, doing a thorough job of it and sucking up a little bit of ad revenue as a result.

Justin and Cody (our 15 and 10 year old sons) recently started messing around with Myst a little bit on my old Mac G3/233 that is in their room. Justin asked me in the car if I knew anything about Myst. Heh. You don't know the half of it, son. When we were at Half-Price books today, I bought Myst III: Exile for eight bucks (I love waiting 3+ years to buy cool games, because they're still cool, I still love 'em, all the bugs have been fixed with downloadable patches, they run great on my behind-the-curve Mac, all the hint/strategy guides are out there and well-developed, and they're dirt cheap). Despite my familiarity and love for the first two games, I really never had a computer at home that was capable of what Exile needed to run well. Now I sort-of do (though the video card obviously isn't ideal because the movies are very jumpy), so I thought I'd give it a shot.

Unlike the first two, this one allows you to move around in a more free-flowing way, kind of like the perspective of a first-person shooter. Well, there's a reason I don't play those kinds of games. They make me nauseous. I played Exile for about an hour and a half last night, solved a couple of puzzles, moved all around the first island, etc., and I ended up with a terrific headache. Felt like I was going to throw up there for a few minutes. I wish there were a way to play it like the way Myst and Riven were set up. I'm not sure I'll be able to play it very much.

So far, if you overlook the vomit factor, it is a fun game, right along with the spirit of Myst and Riven. It's beatiful enough that it almost makes me want to see if I can find one of the recommended video cards for this Mac (Blue G3/300), but probably the solution is just a faster Mac. Maybe once I inherit the G4/800 from my office, I'll be able to successfully play in short spurts. I may fight through it anyway, but I think I'm missing out on some clues (or at least neat stuff) by not seeing the videos play properly.

Posted by Observer at March 13, 2005 08:04 AM