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Comment by wycy | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I was just too young at the time, but I had Myst/Riven as a kid and never even began to understand what the objective was or what I was supposed to do. Aside from a little bit of walking back and forth, I don't think I accomplished a single thing in game.

Given the article references 6 and 8 year olds playing, maybe I was just a dumb kid.

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This remember me of a game a friend and me buy from a store. I don't remember the name.

We try to play it for hours. We die at every step.

Only the character was visible. All the rest was pitch black.

We die a lot.

Eventually, memorizing each die pattern, we found a tiny bit of light on the background.

Then, I increase the monitor bright. What idiots!

lol :-)

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.

Despite playing the piano, I never could get past that puzzle until I figured out how to make the computer record itself. I recorded playing the notes on the spaceship's keyboard, then played it back as I adjusted the sliders on the other side of the ship.

Did anyone else solve it this that way?

Yes! I had forgotten that I did this.

That's very cool. I love that a game inspired someone to problem solve on that sort of level.

That's what I feel Myst brought that has been so rarely replicated.

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.

I had the same tin ear problem. Then I returned to Myst as an adult and I realized that the position on the spaceship slider corresponded to the position of the key on the piano and I solved the puzzle by counting!

Or just not patient enough? Note that the kids from the article were guided by their parent in the game.

My experience is not very different from yours. I remember going back and forth on the first island and playing with the different puzzles. I was just minding my own business in the game and imagining my own story without taking any interest in the game scenario.

The world was more boring then. Myst might have been the only interesting game you had for a month or more.

Nah, I think you were just too young. Sure there were outliers, but it was targeted at an older gaming crowd.

We played it as a family; one of us would take notes, another would be 'at the controls', and the rest would be observing and helping solve the puzzles. Social gaming back before everyone had their own pocket-sized computer :-)

Yes - this was a large part of the delight! My kids and I spent many enjoyable hours together with the Myst games.

Yeah I was like 9-12 at the time I played Myst and I got maybe 10 minutes into the game and spend countless hours trying to find something I couldn't find. Really frustrated me and made me hate the game. I think I eventually found it or figured it out, but the very next "clue" or whatever was even harder and after a while I just gave up on the game completely.

Myst wasn’t actually a very good game for this reason. A lot of the ‘puzzles’ were just clicking every pixel on every screen of the island to find some hidden thing. Riven was a good game though, with challenging but fair puzzles.

It’s basically like how Super Mario 3 is one of the greatest games of all time, but the only real was to beat the original was by cheating since the last level was an invisible maze with no internal clues on which way to go.

I think it's visually apparent in Bowser's Castle when you've made progress vs. being sent back, which is kind of similar to some of the earlier maze fortresses like the first fortress in World 3. There are other levels that have doors or pipes that either do or don't send you somewhere useful.

But solving any of these mazes without a strategy guide will probably call for multiple lives because you almost certainly won't be able to find the complete solution in a single run-through. I think that's characteristic of many Super Mario 3 levels, though, because pipes and doors that send you backwards aren't that uncommon.

Other examples of tricky maze levels where you have to explore a lot:

6-5 (you have to fly while holding a Koopa shell in a place where it's not particularly obvious)

7 first fortress (again, you have to fly in one particular place in order to escape)

8 fortress (lots of backtracking, several different ways to solve it)

Edit: I didn't realize that when you said "the original" you were referring to Super Mario Bros. rather than Super Mario 3. I agree that 8-4 in the original Super Mario Bros. is a huge nuisance to figure out although I think you can get it with a degree of discipline, probably in only 1-3 lives. If I remember correctly, there are three branching points where you have to repeatedly choose passageways and you can be sent back if you chose the wrong one. I think the hardest branching point gives either 8 or 9 total possibilities, of which only one is correct.

SMB3 offered an easy 100 lives plus continues. The parnent was referring to the original SMB, where you had to play the whole game, try to solve an invisible maze once or twice (unless you got good at the one or two 100 lives spots), and then play the whole game from the beginning (which you might fail at!) to get another chance at exploring the maze. It was a common tactic to make short games feel long.

Oh, I thought we were talking about Bowser's Castle in SMB3 rather than SMB! I've edited my comment above.

Riven did have a couple of annoying "click until you get it" spots (the pitch-black tunnel in the boiler room, for example), but yeah, the puzzles were much more organic.

My experience exactly. I went back and tried to do a walkthrough, but I couldn't even follow that.

Same, but after enough time I figured out some cool stuff, never beat the game.

Very mysterious world, I found it very fascinating.

Now that we have youtube, Ive watched how to win.

I was the same, couldn't make any sense of first puzzle I ran into and gave up.

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