Myst IV Revelation

I have a mild cold. Last night I was very congested and sneezy, and Debbi made me go to bed on time. (Heh.) Today I felt much better in the morning, but started wearing down as the day wore on, so I decided to punt on playing Ultimate and came home and read comics instead. Early to bed again tonight, and hopefully I'll be all better tomorrow.

Since I bought my new Power Mac I've been spending some time playing computer games which I haven't been able to play for a few years due to my antiquated hardware. As I noted back when, I played Alida as soon as I bought the machine, and then a couple of months or so back I picked up the recently-released Myst IV Revelation, the latest in the series of popular adventure/puzzle/virtual reality games. I played it off-and-on and finally finished it a couple of weeks ago.

As I'm sure I've noted before, I was a huge fan of the original MYST. It was the first game where I had a moment where I felt like I was practically in the game. 10 years later that seems kind of silly since its graphics seem quaint now, but at the time it was amazing. A groundbreaking game. I played Riven as soon as it came out (actually Ceej and I kinda-sorta played it together, e-mailing each other feverishly as we played, which was a great experience in itself). Riven was a big step forward in graphics and a small step forward in gameplay, but felt rather constrained compared to the imagination that went into MYST. Then there came Myst III Exile, which was even more fun even if it felt like a side-issue as far as its story went. But I still remember it fondly and enjoyed playing it a lot.

Myst IV Revelation is cut from the same cloth as Myst III Exile, with full-sphere graphics rendering, so you can pivot in all directions to see around you. The graphics are fabulous, beautifully rendered and practically lifelike. The integration with the animations is almost seamless, and they're slowly making progress in putting other people in a scene without making it too contrived that you can't really interact with them. Jack Wall's music is maybe even better than his Exile score was.

The story involves you going to see Atrus, the main figure in the previous game, and meeting his young daughter Yeesha. Atrus has been troubled for the past decade ever since he consigned his backstabbing sons Sirrus and Achenar to separate prison worlds, and at the urging of his wife Catherine has concocted ways to view them and even visit them safely. Atrus leaves on an errand while you're there, and an earthquake strikes his home knocking you out. When you come to, it's night and Yeesha is gone. Clues indicate that she's been kidnapped, so you set off on an odyssey exploring the prison worlds Sirrus and Achenar were trapped in, and finding out what they've been up to in the interim.

In the end, I think Revelation is a step backwards from Exile, for several reasons.

One is the elimination of the series' tradition "Zip Mode", where you can quickly move from one spot to another with a single click. It's been replaced with a completely different system (with the same name) which tightly constrains where you can "zip" to, and is more cumbersome to use. Frustrating.

The big one, though, is that the story and the puzzles don't really hold up. The puzzles run the gamut from trivial to intensely frustrating. There seem to be more puzzles than usual which rely on being able to see something which is hidden for no good reason (possibly just bad graphic design), which sent me running around in circles until I either saw what I'd missed or gave up and went to a Web walkthrough (of which, by the way, this one is the best one I found). An unwelcome addition to the kinds of puzzles are ones which require you to do something in a tight span of time, and which is difficult for most people to get right without several tries. These puzzles tended to be frustrating because of the difficulty in using the mouse to manipulate on-screen controls. (Then there was the puzzle which required translating some names in a fictional language, which even with the walkthrough I couldn't understand; I just took the explanation on faith. Aargh.) Finally, many puzzles just didn't make much real-world sense. The prison age of Spire featured a complicated multi-layered puzzle using different physical principles, but didn't go deeply enough into the principles for them to make sense. And the introduction of overt mysticism in the age of Serenia was an especially annoying twist to the overall story.

The story had its ups and downs. Seeing the development of Sirrus and Achenar through the journals and memories presented by the game was fun, and the actors portraying the characters were convincing (the series has come a long way from when MYST creators Rand and Robin Miller portrayed all the characters in the original game). Being able to actually return to a few locations from the introduction of Exile was also fun. The plot of the villain hinged on the wacky spiritual nature of Serenia, which I found jarring, and Atrus' general absence from the bulk of the game felt contrived. There is a moment of true tragedy at the end which was moving, though. Kudos for pulling that off.

So overall Revelation felt like a mixed bag: Looked great, story was okay, gameplay was mediocre. While I enjoyed the milieu more than I did that of Alida, I think Alida had superior gameplay, so it's hard to say which one I enjoyed more.

Well, okay: I know that I enjoyed Myst III Exile more than either of them.

I think my next game is either going to be Railroad Tycoon 3 or Sim City 4. I enjoyed the original Railroad Tycoon a lot, and didn't really play RT2 (just wasn't in a gaming mood at that point, I guess). I was a big fan of Sim City and even more of Sim City 2000, but Sim City 3000 felt like just a warmed over version of 2000 and I didn't care for it much. It looks like SC4 adds in a number of complexities I've been wishing for since the original, so I'm actually getting pretty excited about the prospect of playing it. So it may be my next choice.

It'd give me something to do over my holiday break, anyway.

Like I need more to do...