Myst creators launch Kickstarter to bring every game in the series to Windows 10
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/
That said, I really wish the creators remake these games for the mobile. These kind of puzzle games dont have any of the FPS requirements that today's mobile phones cant handle. The beautiful scenes that Myst was well known for can easily be rendered on a 4 year old phone as well.
But most importantly, touch and gyroscope opens up degrees of freedom that was previously impossible to conceive. Imagine an AR like Myst.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noodlecake...
http://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thou...
If you like Myst, give it a try, you want be disappointed.
And its Linux supported too!!!
I suggested to one of the Niantic developers (Ingress, Pokemon Go) that they could make interesting "historical fiction tours" that people would likely pay for. Basically have the customer travel around a city to important places and solve a "mystery" associated with some historical event. You could use some of the Ingress mechanics where you would "pick up" a clue at a location that was a playable video file. That would lead you to the next clue. You could "uncover" secret locations by locating yourself relative to landmarks and entering a sequence, etc.
Cyan's most recent, Obduction, has VR support.
One of the unusually good things about Riven is how well integrated and justified every puzzle was into the world; the storyline and environment genuinely didn't just feel like an excuse for the game to throw puzzles at you. Sometimes I play games which are puzzles for puzzles sake (I'm fond of DROD), but it's a very different thing.
They've already surpassed their goal.
Whatever, I'm almost certainly in on this.
I seem to recall hearing that there wouldn't be a similar Riven remake, due to loss of the source assets from that game. I assume the new package will be using the same GOG versions you can get now, with the original stills.
It's also worth checking out the fan-run Starry Expanse project[0], which is an attempt to manually recreate the entirety of Riven in a modern 3D environment. Progress is very slow, but already looks quite impressive.
I'm really excited to see that they've finally got the rights to III and IV, which I always felt were the technical/visual peak of the series.
I think if I had a fully VR version, I would've ended up spending too much time on all the ancillary props that were scattered about everywhere.
And I'd end up about a hundred times saying "Oh, there's salt-shaker on the table. I'd better try to pick it up and examine it." rather than heading towards the stuff that actually advanced the story.
If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck).
I felt like there were far too many moments in Riven where I didn't look in just the right place (the space at the bottom of a door, for example) and so I couple not progress. I played the original 5 CD version where you had to swap CDs as you moved around. Further into the game it finally requests "Insert disc 5". Somewhat fittingly for Riven I couldn't find the fifth disc because it was hidden behind other discs in the double CD jewel case....
Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook.
This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with.
There are a few exceptions... a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example.
What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.
It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.
The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. Uru: Complete Chronicles collects ~"season one" and "season two" in a lonely single player form, but the best way to experience them is to grab a friend or three and log in to one of the MO:UL servers [1] that are mostly open source at this point and have been run for the last few years entirely through combinations of Cyan Worlds good will and fan dedication.
All of which is to say that the compromises that made Myst 5 feel "poor" compared to Riven I think are much more due to the lost opportunities of changing waters in an amazing, but troubled business model (the world's largest attempt at a graphical massive multiplayer online third person puzzler), and Cyan Worlds doing needs must to survive (spinning content back out into single player adventures to sell at retail, just like they did with "Complete Chronicles", and using a name they knew would sell, Myst 5).
(There's some sadness that the Myst 5's Ages likely will not be reintegrated into Uru, and I can't play Myst 5 without instinctively trying for my Relto book or KI and being sad when those don't work.)
There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between Aladdin and Riven.
(also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out, and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005, before GameTap's Uru launched)
> (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted
I mentioned that obliquely in that it had a long history. I played every version. If we want to play pedantry, that "test-ish" server you are thinking on was Ubi's official server which was meant to be the original MMO publisher before Ubi got cold feet and shut down all of their MMOs.
You are correct that Myst 5 came out before GameTap's server, and I misremembered that, but the exact order of operations isn't entirely critical to my point that Myst 5 was a "keep the lights on" release of content originally meant to be slowly released to Uru. Ubi's cold feet scuttled five years or so of planning. GameTap's scuttled two or three years. Between the two "publishers", Cyan Worlds got several hugely raw deals.
Edit: I just noticed they released the original Myst on 3DS back in 2012.
Steam games are cheap, old games are cheap, lots to choose from.
Nintendo(or other consoles), full price 60$ games, 40$ on sale. First party games are the primary buy, and those are few and far between.
The last Nintendo console I owned was the GC, I havent looked back. There are enough cheap games for the PC that I dont miss out on the last 2 zelda games.
I gave up on CDs when I was dealing with a corrupt CD drive or SATA cable.
It was weird, but after I disconnected it, it took me years to use it, and that was for Ubuntu install.
The one that gave me the most troubles was Riven (before I got it from GOG). For this one I had to do some mumbo-jumbo to finally get a full screen yeah.
Cyan Worlds already did this multiple times. I just want to mention "Myst: Masterpiece Edition" (adding 24 bit true color graphics instead of 256 color 8 bit graphics), "realMyst" (adding 3D graphics and (small spoiler) na nqqvgvbany ntr pnyyrq "Evzr") and "realMyst: Masterpiece Edition" (better 3D graphics).
Yes it does.
EDIT: From the KS page, "A Word to Mac Users" This does not lead me to believe it's going to be something like an SDL2 port but a one off port. I hope I can be proven wrong.
EDIT2: Another World/Flashback was ported a while ago, but that was built on a VM, which is very cool: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php
There’s also the face that video is no longer cutting edge.
Instead new versions of Windows are released as updates of Windows 10.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/09/windows-1...
Does this mean that Windows 10 apps released today will run on the latest “Windows 10” years in the future? Only time will tell I guess, but if there is one thing Microsoft has been good at historically it’s been backwards compatibility. Not perfect, but still so good at it that they deserve recognition for that. Credit where credit is due and all that, even for an operating system that I generally don’t like and don’t want to use.