April 7th, 2013
Warning: Spoilers abound. If you haven’t played Myst V, I suggest you do so before proceeding. You can buy it at gog.com.
“What you still don’t understand, you have failed to hear or don’t need to know.” – Yeesha
“Consider it a ‘Myst’ opportunity.” – Esher
At long last, here we are. From the heights of the Fifth Age to the lows of Serenia, through Stoneship and Ahnonay, from the Cavern to Terahnee, we now gather for one last journey, one last quest. I begin to understand why Yeesha talks like that; it’s much easier to write than meaningful sentences, yet it still manages to sound profound.
All silliness aside, Myst V is the end, “the final chapter,” as the box proclaims. Considering how vast and varied a journey it’s been, wrapping it all up is a tall order. We have loose ends from Atrus’s family turmoils, we still don’t know Yeesha that well, the question of the Restoration is still in the air, and (of course) the Bahro. Naturally we also want to check out a few of our favorite old haunts, and see some new places as well. Myst V: End of Ages manages to hit a few of these notes. It has some nice character moments, some spectacular Ages, and the occasional pinch of nostalgia. Unfortunately, it also has some fairly serious flaws that drag down the experience considerably. Is it a fitting end for the series? Considering some of the high points we’ve seen, for the most part it isn’t. At best it’s a predictable end to the series, delivering most of the elements we’ve come to expect, both the good and the bad. Let’s begin.
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Tags: Bahro, D'ni, Esher, game design, Laki'ahn, Myst Island, Noloben, puzzles, Rime, Taghira, Todelmer, Twin Peaks, Yeesha
Posted in Myst in Retrospect | 7 Comments »
February 11th, 2013
Warning: Spoilers abound. If you haven’t played Uru, I suggest you do so before proceeding. You can buy it at gog.com.
On many occasions I’ve mentioned Myst to an avid video game enthusiast and seen the same reaction: their eyes glaze over and they say that they thought it was boring. As I’ve established throughout these reviews, one’s enjoyment of these games is due in large part to one’s willingness to meet the game’s story at the level it’s being presented. Uru, as we have seen, tends to be even more difficult to appreciate, since its story is obscure at best, and feels somewhat empty even to invested players. This final installment, sadly, does nothing to correct that precedent, and unfortunately compounds it with an almost complete lack of storyline and some of the most tedious and repetitive puzzles ever devised. Uru: The Path of the Shell is not without its charms, but the inescapable fact is that it is, in all honesty, pretty boring.
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Tags: Ahnonay, Chosen One, credibility, destiny, Er'Cana, game design, Kadish, prophecy, puzzle design, The Path of the Shell, tropes, Uru, Yeesha
Posted in Myst in Retrospect | 10 Comments »
February 2nd, 2013
The complete anthology of Sunrise, my now-completed webcomic, is now available for purchase. Until February 16, the option of a signed and/or drawn-in copy is available. See this page for more details, or see below and after the fold for additional pictures and information. Click here to go ahead and order a copy for yourself.
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Tags: shameless salesmanship, Sunrise anthology
Posted in Artwork, Comics, Sunrise | 1 Comment »
January 26th, 2013
trying to remember,
once upon a time, I would
create a single polygon the shape of the perimeter of the fence line.
project this to terrain/ground
wall plus this nonplanar face
set the proflie in wall plus to have a 30 degree bend at the top about a foot down (two points) -gives a “3d” fence with barbed wire geometry at top
texture with nearest (to have forced poles at the corners – do texture accordingly) -wasnt a CDB db
then those polys were all reset to view 2x
shade
(Source here.)
Tags: found poem, poetry
Posted in Et Cetera | No Comments »
January 18th, 2013
Warning: Spoilers abound. If you haven’t played Uru, I suggest you do so before proceeding. You can buy it at gog.com.
“[L]ooking back at the others about the table, he smiled and raised his goblet. ‘To D’ni!’ he exclaimed. A dozen voices answered him robustly. ‘‘To D’ni!‘” – Myst: The Book of Ti’ana, pg. 142
“There’s a couple things that the fans will like. I think the first is the fact that they get to go to D’ni. And anybody who knows our stuff on a little bit deeper level knows that D’ni is someplace you want to go.” – Rand Miller, interview from Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Edition
Long before Uru was released, it was well-understood among the fan community that the game would finally allow players access to D’ni itself. This was, undoubtedly, the game’s strongest selling point among the fans. It was something of a disappointment, therefore, to find that Ages Beyond Myst offered only cursory glimpses of the Cavern: a couple small balconies, a rooftop, and a tiny office. Sure, you could catch a glimpse of Kerath’s Arch (a well-known D’ni landmark), but unless you were one of the lucky few who had access to Uru Live, D’ni seemed to be nearly as far away as ever. It wasn’t until the collapse of the multiplayer edition that the Cavern was opened to all, in the form of this first expansion pack, To D’ni. It was made available free of charge, which makes it clear that its intent is to grant D’ni access to as many people as possible following the demise of the online community. It’s not much of a game, per se, but it’s not really trying to be: we, the fans, wanted access to D’ni, and they gave it to us. In addition to that we also got some closure to the Uru Live storyline, a objective (albeit a somewhat dull one), and some foreshadowing of the expansion yet to come. Overall it’s somewhat impressive that Cyan Worlds managed to release something of this scope even while reeling from the destruction of its longtime labor of love, but the inescapable fact is that To D’ni’s meager content is somewhat beaten down by its tedious and repetitive gameplay mechanics. To D’ni wanted to be more than a couple additional environments, but in actuality that would have been enough.
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Tags: D'ni, DRC, game design, Myst, Path of the Shell, To D'ni, Uru
Posted in Myst in Retrospect | 2 Comments »
January 6th, 2013
Welcome all to the second annual end-of-year roundup of various media I consumed this year. This year I kept a list, so this is guaranteed to be comprehensive. Instead of alphabetical order, entries are listed in the order read (within each category). As in last year, recommendations are in bold. Mini-reviews provided below entries, as applicable. Starred entries I only read part of, usually books of short stories. Note: also includes movies!
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Tags: anime, authors, books, Comics, Fiction, movies, non-fiction, recommendations
Posted in Et Cetera, Review | 2 Comments »
December 8th, 2012
Warning: Spoilers abound. If you haven’t played Uru, I suggest you do so before proceeding. You can buy it at gog.com, and it’s actually on sale this weekend, so why not.
Imagine a new social network based on poems. The site will debut with a selection of original poems, and you and your friends will be able to read them and base your interactions on them. Gradually new poems will be added to the mix and the userbase will be able to slowly understand and help to build a narrative around the poems, creating a sort of living, breathing artwork. It’s a clever idea, and a couple poems released as teasers show that the site has a lot of promise. Sadly, however, when the site finally debuts, something has gone wrong in development. Instead of the vibrant scene you were promised, there’s just one page with a handful of poems. There’s not even anywhere to post a comment. The poems are still well-written, and you enjoy reading them, but you can’t shake the feeling that you could have been a part of something much bigger. Welcome to the beautiful and depressing world of Uru.
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Tags: Ages Beyond Myst, Bahro, D'ni, DRC, Eder Gira, Eder Kemo, Gahreesen, game design, Kadish Tolesa, Myst, puzzle design, Teledahn, The Cleft, Uru, Yeesha
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
October 7th, 2012
Warning: Spoilers abound. If you haven’t read The Book of Ti’ana, I suggest you do so before proceeding. You can buy all three novels here.
We’ve reached the end of the Atrus-centric installments, which leaves only one direction to go: the backstory. Backstory is an important part of any fictional universe, as the additional details we learn from it add to the believability of the world overall. The Myst series, having created this vast edifice of D’ni to support Atrus’s story, has an almost infinite amount of space for additional backstory. We want to know more about D’ni, its inhabitants, and its history. Myst: The Book of Ti’ana, and our final two games, Uru and Myst V, give us a glimpse of the days before Atrus and the span of the D’ni society of old. As we move through the D’ni-centric arc, we’ll consider the following questions: can backstory itself be a story? If not, what does it take to make a backstory into a frontstory? Let’s begin.
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Tags: Ae'garis, Anna, backstory, character development, D'ni, hubris, pacing, storytelling, Suahrnir, The Book of Ti'ana, Veovis
Posted in Myst in Retrospect, Review, Writing | 6 Comments »
August 21st, 2012
Warning: Spoilers abound. If you’ve not played Myst IV: Revelation, I recommend playing (most of) it before proceeding. You can buy it from Amazon.com or eBay.
Myst IV: Revelation is an impressive accomplishment: surely no other work of art in human history has managed to be so immersive and realistic while simultaneously preventing any degree of credibility. Where it’s good it rises to great heights…which unfortunately gives it that much more distance to fall. Exile set a fairly low standard, and while Revelation largely improves upon Exile’s mistakes, it fails to emulate Exile’s successes. This makes for a frustrating game: too flawed to be great, but with too many good bits to be written off completely.
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Tags: Achenar, Atrus, canon fatigue, feminism, game mechanics, Katran, magic, Myst IV, puzzle design, Revelation, Serenia, Sirrus, storytelling, Yeesha
Posted in Myst in Retrospect | 4 Comments »
July 8th, 2012
Warning: Spoilers abound. If you haven’t played Myst III: Exile, you might want to consider doing so before proceeding. As far as I know there is no downloadable version of it available online, your best bet is to search Amazon. I’d recommend the 10th Anniversary DVD Edition, which is stable, can run on Linux, and requires no disc-changing.
“I started off seeing it from a kind of ‘artist’s perspective;’ I would look for the most interesting scene that I could come up with. But the problem I ran into was that every time I made it look interesting, it didn’t work for the interface because it was unrealistic. You don’t look at everything as a composition. When you’re walking through a room, you’re just walking through a room, you’re not stopping and staring at everything.” – Chuck Carter, Digital Artist, Myst (from “The Making of Myst”)
“The really early decision that we made was to try to create a story context that would really offer us the opportunity to create a lot of deliberate puzzles.” – Michael Kripalani, Executive Producer, Myst III: Exile (From “The Making of Myst III: Exile”)
After Riven was released, Cyan elected to go quiet for a while in order to research and produce a massive new project, a multiplayer adventure game code-named “Mudpie.” Mattel Interactive, which around this time acquired the publishing rights for the franchise, was impatient. Riven had just become the fastest-selling game so far, and naturally they wanted to reproduce that effect. Presto Studios, makers of the popular Journeyman adventure games, were called upon to pick up the slack. The game they created was Myst III: Exile. The Presto team did a good job, and in most respects the game is fairly solid, but throughout it has the slightly-off flavor of a work produced not by inspiration but as something to be sold.
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Tags: art direction, Atrus, Brad Dourif, Exile, game design, Katran, lesson age, Lord of the Rings, Myst III, Narayan, puzzle design, Saavedro, Star Wars, storytelling, sympathetic antagonist
Posted in Myst in Retrospect | 5 Comments »