Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 144 posts

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#131

Post by duskwuff »

rleigh wrote: post #70
jandrese wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made decent progress solving the puzzles in Myst until I got to that rocket ship and discovered that my tin ear was a showstopper. It didn't help that my machine (A Mac LC with 4 MB of RAM) was only barely powerful enough to run the game, and when it ran out of resources the first thing to go was the sound.

The sound is not a requirement. You can complete it with a pencil and paper, mapping it out pretty quickly.

You're thinking of the maze on Selenetic Island, which comes later. jandrese was referring to the puzzle in the rocket ship on Myst Island, which required the player to play notes on a piano, turn around, and set sliders to play the same notes. This puzzle was a prerequisite to reaching the maze you were thinking of.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#132

Post by duskwuff »

drdeadringer wrote: post #51
dmschulman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the best music ever composed for a computer game I'd argue.

I've some of the OSTs at home 'cause I liked it so much.

They're available on iTunes, FWIW. I'm especially fond of the Riven soundtrack; it's got a great meditative mood to it.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/robyn-miller/447729601

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#134

Post by rleigh »

duskwuff wrote: post #131
rleigh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sound is not a requirement. You can complete it with a pencil and paper, mapping it out pretty quickly.

You're thinking of the maze on Selenetic Island, which comes later. jandrese was referring to the puzzle in the rocket ship on Myst Island, which required the player to play notes on a piano, turn around, and set sliders to play the same notes. This puzzle was a prerequisite to reaching the maze you were thinking of.

Ah, yes. That one is annoying, indeed. For the keyboard, on at least one playthrough, I think I counted the number of slider positions so you could solve it by the index of the keys on the keyboard.

Still easier than the sound puzzle in Myst IV Revelation though! That required reading a guide to solve it was so unobvious.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#135

Post by __david__ »

gchucky wrote: post #121
giobox wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this is where memories of Myst are best left. At the time I loved it, but in the early 90s one was willing to forgive a game a great many short-comings in sympathy to the state of modern games technology. Myst was very much “state of the art of the possible at the time”. I’d argue that much of the appeal of 90s Myst for some was that such a world could be made at all, let alone be a reasonably competent adven…

Cyan also put out a game called Obduction a little over a year ago that's very much in the same vein as Myst (the Wikipedia article calls it a spiritual successor), only updated to fit the current times. It's really well done, and worth a look.

Obduction is fantastic. Very Myst-like but feels modern. I thought it started little slow but once you unlock some other areas it opens up and becomes really amazing. A lot of the puzzles revolve around a central theme that's both simple to understand but spatially challenging. And everything fits together real nice in a way that I wouldn't have guessed up front.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#136

Post by abakker »

giobox wrote: post #66
weaksauce wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you haven't played it obduction is also in VR and is also made by cyan. I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's definitely harder than myst was.

Yep, this basically is the VR Myst, no need to hold off. It’s of course compromised in all the usual ways 2018 VR typically is, but if you want a Myst style adventure in an expensive, low res vomit inducing uncomfortable headset, have at it! (I say this as a very disgruntled Oculus Rift + Touch owner...)

That's my big problem with VR right now. I love it, but I can't wear any of the existing headsets for more than 5-10 min without a day-long headache. I've always been sensitive to this kind of thing (I couldn't play portal, even on a computer screen). I'll keep an eye on this game, though. Maybe when the headsets get better.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#137

Post by phaylon »

severine wrote: post #90
jandrese wrote: post #27

If anybody is still jonesing for that Myst hit, the pointlessly-online version is completely free to play: https://mystonline.com/en/

If they're really jonesing they'd like to know that you have to create an account to download a Windows only installer ;)

And they want your phone number :)

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#139

Post by mercer »

duskwuff wrote: post #130
zbentley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly, the games that felt to me the most like Myst were not of the same genre (instead, they were D2-ish), graphical detail (they were glorified board games with a few frames of animation) or mechanic (they were RPGs). They were called the "Avernum" games. They started their life as flash games. They had bottomless writing and story behind the franchise, to compensate for their near-total lack of visual splendour…

I think you've got something mixed up. The Avernum series was a set of RPGs, but they were a remake of the creator's earlier Exile series, not a Flash game. ( Exile I: Escape from the Pit was released in 1996, long before Flash was viable for this sort of game.) They weren't procedural at all, either; the content was all handmade.

Exile was my jam. I could never quite get used to Avernum, much as I liked being able to see many more tiles on one screen.

Part of it was the controls: I preferred a proper top-down view over isometric, but the main reason was probably the fact that parties were smaller. In Exile, a party could be 7 characters (I think), and it made the combat feel much more tactical.

Still, both the Avernum and Exile series are amazing, and I can highly recommend them. If you're starting fresh, Avernum 3 is probably a good one to start (it's also the on iPad and decently playable).

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#140

Post by mercer »

netwanderer2 wrote: post #68
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music and the sound in Myst and Riven were both outstanding - absolute classics of the genre, and even more amazing given that they were an amateur effort by one of the creators, and not the work of a full-time composer or game sound designer. There was one location in Riven where I spent about fifteen minutes listening to a short-ish music loop over and over and watching a simple atmospheric location animation,…

This really proves in the arts and creative business, it's really an individual's work that connects the souls. You can have a team of thousands of people, but if no one has any vision or creativity then their work can go straight down the toilet.

Prince of Persia and Rollercoaster Tycoon come to mind (and are apparently quite the HN darlings).
Post reply on HN