![]() ![]() Yet, each time a new game was released, I was obsessed about it until finishing-I remember once I drove home from work at lunchtime because I’d had an insight into solving some puzzle, and needed to check it out immediately. Keep in mind I had a day job in all these years (up to 2012), and since 2001 have had a live-in partner who disapproves of computer games, so I was only able to play them evenings, weekends, or on the sly. Uru Live (online, the PC game with additional areas to explore), 2007 intervals over several months as new areas were released at intervals.Uru expansion packs, 2004, 3 or 4 days each.RealMyst, 2001, was straightforward because it was the same puzzles as Myst.Myst, 1994, took me 10 days to complete.Here’s a photo of all the physical editions I have, from the first releases of all the games through Uru and Myst V (IIRC the Uru expansion packs were downloads), a “10th Anniversary DVD Edition” of the first three games, the three print guidebooks I have, and finally the recent Myst 25th Anniversary Collection, which I helped fund on Kickstarter, with versions of all the games that will run on modern computers, encased in a big box that mimics the “books” used in most of the games.Īnd since I keep records about everything, I’ll note the following: Over the following 20 years, I eagerly purchased each new Myst game as it was released. (For later games, I once had to purchase new graphics card, or several times install updated graphic drivers.) Oh, and those collecting large video or music files. The only people who worry about such stat’s now, I gather, are the gamers, whose new adventures require greater and greater computer power and memory and sophisticated graphics cards. The new one was a HP 8175 PC (Pentium II 233, 48 meg RAM, 56K modem, 17” monitor)-note the modem, this was pre-wifi, and the careful attention to specs about random access memory. Trying it on the Gateway caused it to hang whenever I came into a scene with one of those spinning domes. Four years later, in 1997 (as I was launching the initial Locus Online website), I had to buy yet another new computer to play Riven. I had to buy a new PC – a Gateway desktop, in a huge tower – to play it. The first Myst game came out in 1993 and I was given it as a gift, by my long-time friend Larry Kramer, in 1994, for my birthday. The Myst games, of course, are another league entirely than the solitaire games that take a few minutes each per round. In the ‘90s there was Tetris later things like Minesweeper more recently Microsoft solitaire card games, and especially, currently, Microsoft’s Wordamant, where I play every month’s map and every day’s Daily Challenge. In fact over the 30 some years since I bought my first computer-a genuine IBM PS/2 ( ) for some $2000, in 1987-I’ve played various solitaire games in part out of compulsion and in part as a mechanism to distract my conscious attention while my deep mind ponders other things. I should set the context that I have never been a “gamer,” and in particular have never had any interest in “first-person shooter” games or racing car games or any games that involve competition with other players. RealMyst, Uru, and later Obduction, were vast improvements: the player, using arrow keys, could move freely in any direction, look around from any spot. By Myst IV you could at least swivel around from each node to see your surroundings in every direction… That was true of Myst V too. In Myst and Riven and Myst III the point of view at each node was fixed. The issue is that the early games in the franchise were what were derisively called “slideshow” games in which the player could move only to certain preordained positions or nodes. And, well, I played RealMyst not the original Myst. Well, not played I followed walkthroughs posted on various online sites, to revisit the games’ environments, their beauty, without having to re-solve all their puzzles from scratch. Instead, inspired by a New York Times article I linked on Facebook,, about the comfort of replaying computer games from years past (the article writer’s childhood my 40s and 50s), I did in fact, over five or six weeks, replay all the Myst games, including the associated Uru and Obduction. I’d started Brian Greene’s intriguing UNTIL THE END OF TIME, and left it suspended around page 30. It was much more important to pay attention to everything going on in the outside world. Things were too unsettled and uncertain to allow for the indulgence of sitting down and turning inward into a book. For the next five weeks I suspended reading of books entirely. His first day working from home was March 17. Here we are at the middle of May, some seven or eight weeks in to stay-at-home orders here in the Bay Area – when it started, my partner began working from home, except for the one day a week he would go in to work, his site’s senior staff alternating days to be on site.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |