![]() ![]() Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. ![]() We talk about the strains of adventure games at the time, HyperCard, the emergence of the CD-ROM platform, and a bit about the game itself. Including a decision that you wouldn't realize makes the game impossible to beat until hours later.Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series looking at 1993's MYST. However, I think that myst is a game that is fun to explore around and mess with stuff, not to actually beat.īut sometimes this was on purpose and developers would intentionally make insane puzzles that were meant to make you take a hammer to your TV. Same goes for Myst.įine, maybe it's not the game for modern gamers, so it technically could be classified as "not aged well". I like zork, I like its attention to detail, and I find it fun to play from time to time. It's polished, detailed, interactive, yet near impossible to play without a walkthrough. No such "Blatantly obvious" guidance was given BITD. Remember, this is the era of "Giant blazing quest markers" to guide people to a quest destination. I remember people had similar complaints about some of Myst's puzzles, BITD. Others, like the "canned goods" puzzle, use words in the english language that are cryptic/obscure, and not in many people's vocabulary these days. If you don't already know about the Bishops and Queens puzzles, you are gonna spend a LOOOOOOOOOONG time solving them, for instance. Similar with the harder puzzles in things like 7th guest. They would fling the game controller/keyboard across the room, angry german kid style. You could spend WEEKS trying to figure out a single action, and timing sequence. Lucas Arts's point click adventure games come immediately to mind While very polished and interactive, they can be extremely frustrating without a walkthrough handy. They used to be more patient with their content. The problem, is that people used to not be so hmm. Personally I'm ambivalent about it but generally speaking, I think anything that expands the audience for games is a good thing. but for the time, the graphics certainly got attention. Over time, it's become more apparent that stylized art direction ages better than whatever the current standard of "realistic" is. I think it's a shame that the drive for 3D in the West really pulled the rug out from under the commercial viability of 2D art, which was at a level of masterpiece virtuosity in that era. (I'm partially kidding and partially not, because of course with prose the "graphics" are your imagination.) I can understand those who say it mainly appealed to "non-gamers" but isn't that just sort of a defensive, tribal outlook on something that massively expanded the audience for PC games? I would say it has aged poorly in the sense that most 3D CG from the 90s has. It might have been more comparable to a text adventure, but with worse graphics. It definitely presented a radically different type of PC game to the prevailing FPS of the era. I remember back in the day when I worked at Electronics Boutique and there was a CD-i demo day that they were pushing the capabilities of the MPEG cartridge (which also added 1MB extra RAM) and how The 7th Guest port was as good as or better than what the best 486 PCs could do at the time. I'm hoping that through her eyes I can gain a deeper personal appreciation for the game/experience.Īs for The 7th Guest, I was well aware of it but don't recall getting around to playing it much, but I do plan on tracking down the CD-i version at some point. I did recently reacquire it for the 3DO (I was debating between that and the CD-i version), so I'll definitely give it a try again, but this time with one of my daughters who likes mysteries. I remember I had a hard time selling my 386 SX-20 with CD-ROM because it couldn't play Myst. I don't feel immersed in what's mostly a static game world and I'm not a fan of those types of puzzles. Part of that bias on my part of course is due to the fact that it's just not a game type I "get". I was never a fan and always believed it to be overhyped. ![]()
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