Lost in a Book, Again
Jul. 12th, 2009 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt started in a casual enough way, just a while back. In a sort of nostalgic mood, I tried searching for videos about the computer game "Myst," and all of a sudden I was looking at a preview promising an iPhone/iPod touch version of it. My instant reaction was that I had to try it when it came out, and that feeling lasted during the days of waiting for it to go up on the application store. It was a big download, more data in fact that could have been fit on the CD-ROM the game originally came on over a decade and a half ago, but I persevered and found myself on the mysterious island once more.
Back in that time just alluded to, my family had got a CD-ROM drive for our upgraded Macintosh LC II computer, and I was pondering pieces in the computer magazines complaining about how slow those drives read data when my brother managed to borrow a new game on CD from a friend. That game, of course, was Myst, and after a strange opening with a book falling through the night sky and thumping down, pointing and clicking our way around the island the volume "linked" to started to get my attention. My family managed to get a copy of the game for ourselves, and I picked up where I had left off, writing down everything that I saw in the notebook provided in the package. It wasn't that long before I had figured out how to find the other books that would get me off the island...
Myst was popular, but as seems somehow inevitable that popularity drew its own share of criticism that obviously the people buying it wouldn't know a good adventure game if they saw one. The only problem with that was that I found myself disagreeing with it. Perhaps, at the core of it, I was more interested in the ideas and story behind the game than in critiques of what its evolution of adventure games could and couldn't let a player do. However, as far as the puzzles went I didn't find the game's machinery that hard to figure out, and I had spent quite a bit of time not that long before finding Myst struggling with the reissue packages of the Infocom text adventures, never quite seeming to guess the right obscure action to take. There was one moment in Myst where I did wind up starting a trial-and-error search for the solution and then glanced into a walkthrough book, but the thing I hadn't thought about there now seems obvious enough in retrospect. As well, I can see it as unusual that the game doesn't have a "real" conclusion that rolls credits and quits, although I'm not willing to make the scandal of it that others seemed to, instead seeing it as "experimental."
In any case, tapping the iPod touch screen to navigate and manipulate seems to work well for me. There seem to be tradeoffs and pecularities because of the way the tiny computer works, but since the first release an update has come out (smaller in size than the original) that seems to clear up some misalignment issues, and I also installed the new system software upgrade and found that the movies integrate better than they used to.
Back in that time just alluded to, my family had got a CD-ROM drive for our upgraded Macintosh LC II computer, and I was pondering pieces in the computer magazines complaining about how slow those drives read data when my brother managed to borrow a new game on CD from a friend. That game, of course, was Myst, and after a strange opening with a book falling through the night sky and thumping down, pointing and clicking our way around the island the volume "linked" to started to get my attention. My family managed to get a copy of the game for ourselves, and I picked up where I had left off, writing down everything that I saw in the notebook provided in the package. It wasn't that long before I had figured out how to find the other books that would get me off the island...
Myst was popular, but as seems somehow inevitable that popularity drew its own share of criticism that obviously the people buying it wouldn't know a good adventure game if they saw one. The only problem with that was that I found myself disagreeing with it. Perhaps, at the core of it, I was more interested in the ideas and story behind the game than in critiques of what its evolution of adventure games could and couldn't let a player do. However, as far as the puzzles went I didn't find the game's machinery that hard to figure out, and I had spent quite a bit of time not that long before finding Myst struggling with the reissue packages of the Infocom text adventures, never quite seeming to guess the right obscure action to take. There was one moment in Myst where I did wind up starting a trial-and-error search for the solution and then glanced into a walkthrough book, but the thing I hadn't thought about there now seems obvious enough in retrospect. As well, I can see it as unusual that the game doesn't have a "real" conclusion that rolls credits and quits, although I'm not willing to make the scandal of it that others seemed to, instead seeing it as "experimental."
In any case, tapping the iPod touch screen to navigate and manipulate seems to work well for me. There seem to be tradeoffs and pecularities because of the way the tiny computer works, but since the first release an update has come out (smaller in size than the original) that seems to clear up some misalignment issues, and I also installed the new system software upgrade and found that the movies integrate better than they used to.