2007

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/a-look-back-at-the-various-ports-of-myst/

NOTE: This has been slightly edited from the original but the contents are 99% the same.

You would think out of all the consoles that would be perfect for a port of the original Myst, the Nintendo DS would in the top 5. It has touch controls, which would be perfect to walk through Myst and solve it's puzzles, and it's portable, which is a nice way to play the game, especially since the game is low stress and you can save anywhere, and it's not like the console didn't have it's fair share of point-and-click adventure games along with adjacent genres like Visual Novels and Hidden Object games. And it's top screen would be great for things like a map for whatever Age you were in, optional hints, and easily showing which page you've picked up without being intrusive on the bottom screen.

But somehow this version of the game ends up being absolutely awful and the problems begin right off the bat.

Both the audio and video have been compressed to the point that the game now looks and sounds awful. I'm fine with each screen being compressed since it was made for something as small as the DS screen, but the compressed sound really ruins the experience. The sound chip in the DS was never the best, but there have been games that have sounded fine, so I don't know how this ended up sounding this bad. And it only gets more grating as the game goes on.

And it’s not like this is a minor nitpick since having the sound be this bad actually affects the gameplay. The puzzles in the Selenitic Age are all based around sound, which means that there is no excuse as to why the game sounds this bad.

Just like the PSP version of Myst, the DS version is missing the flyby videos for each Age. While the PSP had about 1.8 gigabytes to work with, the DS was limited to 512 megabytes at the absolute biggest, so there did have to be some compromise. But considering what the development team did with that with the PSP version of Myst, that compromise didn't have to be there, but more on that later.

But for an actual nitpick, the intro movie for this version of Myst has Comic Sans for the credits. I know that Comic Sans has received a lot of hate over the years, mostly due to people misusing it, but did the developers really have to use Comic Sans of all things? Not something like New Times Roman? It doesn’t even fit with the games tone of aesthetic, which is extra bad since Myst is centered around books of all things. I know it’s kinda pointless, and it was probably chosen because it pops out on the screen, but it still irks me.

And that’s not even the last of it, as the gameplay of Myst, what little it had, also gets a downgrade. Literally the only interactivity that Myst has was clicking on a still image to interact with something, clicking on a still image to move around, or clicking on a still image to pick something up.

In the DS version it took me a couple of taps on the screen to figure out what what exact pixel that I was supposed to click on the be able to do anything. Imagine trying to now only solve the sound puzzles of the Selenitic Age with audio that makes it hard to do so, but having to try and get through the maze twice with these controls is unbearable, even just by thinking about it. The Selenitic Age is borderline unplayable.

But it’s not like this version of Myst is completely without merit. This version does come with a Map that you can easily bring up by tapping the map icon that displays on the top screen showing off whatever location that you’re currently in. I don’t know why it’s not there permanently, but whatever. Whatever page you’ve picked up and are now holding onto are shown in a square instead of just changing the cursor to a hand holding a colored piece of paper, which would have been awful on the DS screen.

The game even come with a camera feature that lets you takes a picture of whatever screen that you’re currently on and displays it on the top screen. It’s limited to one shot at a time, but it’s still nice that it’s in here and can be helpful for puzzles. It comes with the ‘Zip Mode’ that lets you get through areas that you’ve already explored more quickly, and it even comes with a notepad that you can write notes in. You have to type thing out on an onscreen typewriter, which fits aesthetically, but so would have being able to use the stylus to write in a diary or journal. It’s still a good feature.

But just as I was able to say something good about this port of the game, the problems show up again and are even worse.

Just like the PSP port, this also comes with Rime, which was introduced in the original realMyst from the year 2000. It looks just as out of place in this version too, since it's from a game with a completely different engine and aesthetic. And just like the PSP port, it's not only introduced in the same way, with the game just plopping you into the new content without the context that realMyst gave it, but it's done way worse. Not only is it just as awkward to make your way through the Age due to it not being designed to be played as still images like the original was, but now it has the awful controls of the DS version.

Plus the DS version looks much worse that the PSP, since I can barely see anything with just how dark and grey the new area is. And if I wasn't sure if the puzzle introduced in the PSP version was broken, I didn't even try in this version. This whole section could have easily been cut, and should have. I would much rather have the fly-by videos from the original and maybe some better sounds.

It also doesn't help that the homebrew community has ScummVM, which not only would allow you to play Myst: Masterpiece Edition on the DS with some handywork, but is significantly better in every single way.

But the port of Myst to the DS wasn’t the worst port of Myst. In fact, it wasn’t even the worst version of Myst on the DS. The 3DS port holds the distinction of being the single worst port of Myst in existence.

2012

ORIGINALLY POSTED HERE: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/a-look-back-at-the-various-ports-of-myst/

NOTE: This has been slightly edited from the original but the contents are 99% the same.

Surprisingly, this is the second port of Myst to one of the DS handhelds. And you would think that it would be at least better than the first one, right? Nope. Somehow it's much, much worse.


You would think of all places that would be perfect for a port of the original Myst, the 3DS would be in the top 5 of that list, but somehow the 3DS versions is possibly the worst version of Myst. Or should I say, realMyst.

That's right, instead of just porting the original version of Myst to the 3DS, this version instead replaces all of the images from that version with screenshots from the original realMyst from 2001 replicating the stills from the original game. At least someone had the same thought that I did when I played the PSP port in that just shoving the new content from the 2000 version of realMyst didn't match up to the older content, which was both pre-rendered and 7 years old at that point. The one advantage to this is that Rime is finally consistent with the rest of the game, at least in this version. And that is the one compliment that I'm going to give the game.

For the more observant, this means that since it's using images the game can't even take advantage of the 3D that the 3DS was made with. Which is extra frustrating since the original realMyst was sold on the fact that it was using real time 3D. What's the point of using realMyst as a basis if you can't use the fact that it's running in real time to your advantage? Plus certain images are now misaligned when you open up things like draws and doors or change something in the environment. Clearly the developers didn't have the time or means to take the pictures in the game properly.

And on top of that, instead of suing the images on the bottom screen where it would have made sense since that screen is where you interact with the game, the still images are now on the top of the screen, with the menus on the bottom screen. The entire game is clicking still images and is where you're going to be spending most of your time, why would you ever put where most of the gameplay is going to be on the top screen? If I had to take a guess, this was probably done because the top screen of the 3DS is much nicer than the original DS screen and the development team probably wanted to take advantage of that to make the clearer, which would have been a problem if they had just ported the original game. Or if they had made their own engine and recreated realMyst to take advantage of the hardware. But again, I don't think the team had the time or money to do so.

Thankfully it comes with all of the features from the original DS port, including the maps for each age, the notebook, and the in-game camera that lets you take screenshots if you need or want to remember something. But how you get to Rime is still the same as the PSP port and original DS port. What's the point of using realMyst as you're base when you're still going to just drop you in front of the new book and not use to opportunity to give the game new gameplay?

But none of that come even close to being the worst part of this port of Myst. If it was just Myst with still images of realMyst instead using the still images from the original and having the still screens on the top, it would have at least been competent, even it not optimal.

But the worst thing about this version are the controls.

This version of Myst tries to make up for the fact that you can’t directly interact with each screen in this version by having a cursor. To control the cursor you have to use the Circle Pad. You can’t even use the D-Pad, it’s the Circle Pad or nothing. If that wasn’t bad enough, the moment that you let go of the Circle Pad, the cursor snaps back to the center of the screen instead of just leaving the cursor wherever you have it last on the screen. Which means that you have to spend a lot time holding it in place to interact with something or move it around with small movements if you have to move anything.

How do you even mess up Myst this badly? Literally the entire game is pointing and clicking on still images. It’s the most simple concept for a game that it could have been ported to almost anything that had the ability to run it. I’ve played flash games on Newgrounds more competent than this done by complete amateurs. Someone in their first game development class with no previous experience could do a better job. I can’t believe just how badly this version of Myst ended up. This deserves some kind of award for just how awful it is.

And this is on top of other various issues too, like how the sound is out of sync with the videos, and the game having a glitch that could cause your save to become corrupt, having to start the entire game over again.

And the game comes with various other issues too, like how the sound is out of sync with the videos, and the game has a glitch that could cause your save to become corrupt. But all of those seem so trivial for a version of a game that is frustrating to play even if they didn’t exist.

The 3DS version of Myst might be one of the worst ports of any game and one of the worst games on the 3DS.

And to top it all off, the homebrew community for the DS and 3DS can run ScummVM, a program which lets you run Myst: Masterpiece Edition on the handheld flawless, and significantly better than both the DS and 3DS ports. When a bunch of hobbyists could easily create something that not only lets you play a much better version of Myst on the console, and for free (sans the cost of the SD Card needed to hold the game), along with dozens if not hundreds of other games that the ScummVM emulator supports, a lot of them absolute classics, it's an extra bad look for something that should have been a slam dunk, especially if I'm paying for it.

20 Questions: INFINITE REMIX EDITION

Perfect material for a joke essay video where I know the ending conclusion is going to be "Maybe not everything needs to be analyzed that deeply." right from the beginning that's either going to be 10 minutes or 4 hours long with no in between.

2019

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/28/198x-2019-pc-ps4-xbone-switch-review/

Welcome to Suburbia, just outside the City, some time in the 1980s. This journey follows Kid, a teenager stuck between the limitations of innocent youth and the obligations of inevitable adulthood. Their story unfolds when they happen to stumble across a local arcade – an arcade that shows them new worlds, new meanings, all through the lens of video games. With each vidit to the arcade a new game is uncovered, the Kid grows stronger. Soon the lines between the games and reality starts to blur….

198X pitches itself as an homage to the golden age of 80s games, covering a swathe of the genres that were popular at the time, such as brawlers, shoot ’em ups, racers, side scrollers, and even RPGs, and it makes for a good sampler pack of what the decade had to offer. None of them last all that long nor are they all that difficult, requiring nothing more than some level memorization. The only downside is that while each section has checkpoints for when you die, if you have to quit the game for any reason you have to start the entire section of the game over again. I wish there was some option to choose between “Classic/Retro” or “Modern” in which you could jump back into whatever part of each section you were in before you quit the game.

Plus the game’s presintation is mixed with other things that were popular in the 80s, such as coming of age family and adventure movies along with the anime that was popular in Japan that was also seeing a rise in popularity in the West at the time. But it ends up being incredibly basic, for reasons that I’ll get to in a sec.

Unfortunately there isn’t much more to the game outside of showing off what people find nostalgic about the 80s, as the game as a whole is pretty short. When I say that this games comes off as a sampler pack for the decade, I do mean sampler pack, as it’s only a small offering of what each of the genres it’s showing off look like. Not that its necessarily a bad thing, but it the game was centered around something more substantial.

But I guess this was due to the fact that it was funded through Kickstarter means it was too limited by it’s budget to really do much more than what is presented here.

There is a lot to like here, as brief as it is, but the result is a game that has only the bare bones of an interesting concept. And unfortunately there isn’t going to be a sequel that could iron out any of the issues or expand on it’s good points since the company that developed the game went under. And considering that the digital storefronts for this game claim it as ‘Part 1’, they clearly had plans for more games.

I wish that the studio had the chance to put out at least a second part to iron out some of the issues here, as 198X feels more like a prologue or extended demo of something larger.

I also briefly want to compliment the soundtrack, with tracks ranging from something that would sound right out of a game from the decade it’s making homage to to tracks that give a nice sense of nostalgia. It’s not much but it makes it feel more like a complete package.

I know the game’s length is probably going to put a lot of people off, but I would recommend it on a decent sale, even if it’s too little to late for there to be a sequel.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/the-beast-within-a-gabriel-knight-mystery-gabriel-knight-2-the-beast-within-1995-pc-review/

While the first Gabriel Knight wasn’t a massive success for Sierra, it did receive a lot of critical praise from both critics and adventure game fans alike, so a sequel was greenlit and put into development almost immediately, and a year and a half after the release of the first game, The Beast Within was released.

When the original Gabriel Knight was released, video games were making the transition from the 3 and a 1/2 inch floppy discs that were limited to 1.44 megabytes per disc to CDs which had up to 700 megabytes per disc, and while the original Gabriel Knight did take advantage of the new format by adding voice acting and having cutscenes with more animation, it was still clearly made for floppy discs in mind.

Released in the same year as the first Gabriel Knight, Myst and The 7th Guest were released to both critical and financial success, with Myst becoming the highest selling game at the time and became the reason to own a CD drive, along with several other games around the same time also receiving moderate success, and it really showed off the advantages that the extra space that CDs allowed by adding high quality music and sounds along with videos, and the team behind The Beast Within took notice and decided to use Full Motion Video for the game. Jane Jensen returns to pen the story for it’s sequel, which helps it be consistent in tone with the previous game.

The result of this choice lead to the game using a whopping 6 CDs, which was massive at the time. I know that doesn’t sound as impressive more than 25 years after it’s release considering that file sizes have ballooned so much that the average indie game made up by a small team could easily match it or even surpass it in file size, sometimes by accident even, but it was expensive at the time to print a game on that many discs, and a company wouldn’t normally do that unless the studio knew it was going to be a big hit, or was at least hoping that it was a big hit, or the studio making the game was being incredibly ambitious, requiring all of that extra space.

Considering that The Beast Within was being developed along with and eventually released the same year as other titles developed with a serious tone in mind such as ‘Shivers’, ‘Roberta William’s Phantasmagoria’, and the spin-off of ‘Police Quest’ titled ‘Police Quest: S.W.A.T.’, Sierra was clearly banking on their games being higher quality and more ambitious than a lot of the other games at the time to get their games flying off of shelves, with all of these tiles requiring at least two CDs to store all of their content.

Set one year after the events of the first game, Gabriel Knight has written a best-selling book loosely based on the events in the first game, titled “Voodoo Murders”. Since then, Gabriel has since moved into his late uncle’s castle, Schloss Ritter, located in Rittersberg, Germany, and has taken on the title of Schattenjager, or Shadow Hunter in English, passed down to him from his uncle. Since the events of the first game, Gabriel has been struggling to recreate the success of his previous book, with very little in the way of progress.

One night, during one of his many unsuccessful writing sessions, a group of people from the nearby town arrives at Schloss Ritter in the middle of the night, looking for the Schattenjager with a story that the daughter of one of the townsfolk being attacked and murdered by what they claim is a werewolf. After a moment of reluctance, Gabriel agrees to find the alleged werewolf for them and prevent the killing of more people.

His investigations soon lead him to a shadowy hunting club and infiltrate their ranks by leaving an impression on the person in charge of the club, Baron Von Glower, and while the other members are suspicious of them, Glower vouches for Gabriel, and both of them soon find a connection between them.

In the year that Gabriel has been living in Schloss Ritter, Grace Nakimura, Gabriel’s assistant, has been taking care of his rare book store back in New Orleans. Grace finds this frustrating, since the only communication that she has been getting from Gabriel is through letters in the mail saying that he’s making great progress with his new book and she shouldn’t worry about him and should just focus on taking care of the book store, leaving Grace frustrated that instead of being able to use her abilities as a researcher like she did in the first game by helping Gabriel investigate the Voodoo Murders, which inevitably got him success with his first book, she is relegated to taking care of a dusty old book shop that has been getting an increase in visitors in the form of new fans from Gabriel’s recently successful book.

After an encounter with a particularly annoying fan, Grace decides to temporarily close the book store to visit Gabriel and see if Gabriel is actually making as much progress as his letters say he does and goes to meet up with Gabriel in his recently inherited castle, soon finding that Gabriel had already started his investigation elsewhere, leaving Grace with the Gerde Hull, carer of the Castle that Gabriel inherited from his uncle, which Gerde had previously assisted with and potential love interest, which thankfully goes nowhere. Soon Grace is helping Gabriel with his investigation by researching werewolves as Gabriel is investigating the hunting club, with both of them communicating via mail throughout most of the game.

And just like the first game, ‘The Beast Within’ uses real world locations, history, and people for it’s story. And just like last time, this review/retrospective is going a little too long for me to talk about it, so I’ll have to make another post about it if there’s enough interest for it.

Much like the first game, this got a novelization by Jane Jenson, released in the box with the game, and expands on a lot of the details of the story. It’s hard to get a physical copy of it these days, and if you know where to look by sailing the high seas, you could probably easily track down a copy of it yourself and read it if the game’s plot has peaked your interest.

This time around instead of just playing as Gabriel like in the first game, Grace is now a fully playable character alongside Gabriel, with whole chapters dedicated to just playing as just her. While Gabriel is getting his hands dirty by getting involved with all the major characters involved with the events in the surrounding story and getting close to them, going to any location that seems linked to said characters and events, and generally getting his hands dirty, Grace is at the opposite end of the scale, with her investigating the history of werewolves and the real world history tied to what Gabriel is getting involved with.

And despite being separated for most of the game, Gabriel and Grace still keep in contact by sending each other letters to keep up with each other and to inform the other person of their own investigations. Remember when you actually had to send someone a physical letter via snail mail? Actually, a lot of people reading this would be young enough that they might think snail mail is referring to sending e-mail over a 56k modem, which is also now archaic. Oh no, my back hurts.

For most of the The Beast Within, it’s your typical point-and-click adventure game. You click something and the character moves across the screen to interact with the something that you clicked. It even comes with some helpful ways to guide you through the game if you’re having problems, such as a feature on the map screen that highlights locations that still have things to do at them. But the game is not without some problems.

Because the game is now using real world images instead of pixel art, some stuff naturally blends together where the pixel art might have been used to properly highlight something, through making something distinct or the focus of the room, where as staring at an image of a real world location might not trigger the same response since it might come cross as white noise, even if it isn’t intended. It’s never terrible since everything pretty much makes logical sense, but it can still happen to some degree.

There are also times when the game shows a short video clip to help make transitioning from one location to another smoother, but there have been a few times where I clicked to skip what I thought was a video that I had seen a thousand times before only to find out later through items either appearing, disappearing, or being combined in my inventory, or when something suddenly becomes interactive when it wasn’t before that I realized that I had clicked through an entirely new clip simply because the first moments of it were exactly the same as the other clip. It would have been helpful if the video transition was from a different angrily or at least zoomed in or out so that it would have been easier to notice that the game was signalling that I had trigger something new in the game.

In one of the sections of the game focused on Grace when she is going on a tour of multiple locations, the Neuschwanstein Castle, the Herrenchiemsee Museum, and the Wagner Museum in Chapter 4, you have to go through every single room, look at every single painting, listen to every single tour tape, and read every single plaque under every single painting, costume, and letter sent to make any progress.

As much as I loved this virtual tour of real world events and getting to see real world locations that I’m probably never going to see myself, it can become quite tedious, especially if you’ve missed something and you have absolutely no idea what it was, causing you to have to go back and go through everything again to make sure that you didn’t miss something from earlier. Thank god there was the hint button on the map screen highlighting places with stuff that you still had to do at that specific location, otherwise I would have pulled my hair out wondering exactly what I had to do.

There are also a few minor problems throughout the game, such as the audio quality seeming to change from scene to scene. Sometimes it will sound more compressed and there were a few clipping issues. There will be a few people out there who are into audio who would probably notice, but most people would probably be fine with it.

Like I mentioned in the introduction, the developers of ‘The Beast Within’ decided to jump on the Full Motion Video trend that had become big in the 90s instead of keeping the pixel art of the first game. But unlike most of the other FMV games that were coming out in the mid-90s that were using the lice action videos as a gimmick to try and get their games to fly off shelves through trend chasing, Sierra was actually trying to take advantage of FMV as a new medium to it’s fullest potential, and the effort really shone through, placing ‘The Beast Within’ above it’s competition.

Like most of the ambitious Full Motion Video games of the time, ‘The Beast Within’ uses blue screen to place their actors digitally onto sets that didn’t exist, but unlike other FMV games, a lot of the locations in this game actually existed, it’s just that actually filming in a lot of these locations or building sets would have been prohibitively expensive, and ‘The Beast Within’ was already becoming one of the more expensive video games of it’s time period.

But the one thing that they did do was sent out a few of the developers to the real world locations that were used in this game and took hundreds of images and carefully stitched them together in such a way to make the face feel like it actually took place in the real world locations seen in the game. And credit to the developers, the actually did a pretty solid job of representing the real world locations with their limited budget and time schedule.

The game features real world castles such as “Neuschwanstein Castle”, Burg Rabenstein”, and “Starnberger See”, along with several other real world locations such as the “Hellabrunn Zoo”, the “Richard Wagner Foundation” in Bayreuth, and the “Rathaus-Glockenspiel” and “Marienplat 21” in Marienplatz.

Although the games writer Jane Jensen admits that it was pretty limiting on what the characters could do, since it no longer could get away with the more heightened reality of the first game that allowed the creation of new locations where none existed.

After seeing some of the locations in YouTube videos, in images on Google, or through street view in Google Earth, all of the locations look very close to the real world counterparts, but some smudging of reality to make it work in a video game of course. If you’re a fan of the game and want a vacation, maybe you can take the “Gabriel Knight Tour” if you have the time.

This time around the cast is completely different from the first game, with none of the high-profile actors returning at all, probably due to the previously mentioned increased cost of moving from voice acting to actually filming the equivalent of several hours of live action video. That’s not to say that the actors in this game were bad by any means, but it was clear that actually hiring someone like Tim Curry would have blown the budget of the game several times over, so the developers chose authenticity over star power.

Instead of Tim as the titular Gabriel Knight, Gabriel is now played by Dean Erickson, whose biggest acting credit is this game unfortunately enough. The only other notable role that he ever got is a re-occurring bit part as a waiter for a few seasons on the TV show Fraiser. The difference between Dean and Tim is pretty obvious, as Dean doesn’t even try to mimic Tim’s performance from the original game, instead of going with a smarmy New Orleans accent Dean instead going with his native Californian accent.

Dean did state in an interview with “Adventure Classic Gaming”‘ that he didn’t even try to mimic Tim in any way since, in his own words, there was no way that he could even come close to doing an impression of Tim, so he played the character down to Earth. ‘The Beast Within’ was Dean’s last acting gig and while he did want to pursue acting at the time, he has since move onto other things and seems to have no resentment with the fact that his acting career fell through.

Although I do think that Dean did the best job that he could with this game, the fact that Gabriel now sounds like a confused surfer dude who just found out that werewolves existed throughout the whole game is amusing to me, and watching him try to pronounce German words in his natural accent just adds some unintentional comedy to some of the scenes. Also, “Surfer Dudes Vs German Werewolves” is my idea, do not steal.

This time around Grace is now appropriately played by an Asian Actress, Joanne Takahasi. Unlike Dean, I couldn’t find much about Joanne other than her appearing in a few minor roles, such as a doctor in episode 22 of season 4 of ‘Babylon 5’, which is her biggest role outside of this game. Looking her up on IMDB, the rest of her filmography seems to be dubious in quality from the looks it. Unfortunately Joanne doesn’t seem to act alongside a lot of other characters, although that’s most because of the way the story is told, but I still find it a tad disappointing. Her performance as Grace is solid and she does a pretty good job of helping the character make the transition from the art of the first game to the live action of the second game.

She hasn’t done any interviews about this game and has disappeared from the public eye, which is likely what she is probably enjoying the quiet life.

The other character who is important to the games story is Baron Friedrich Von Glower, played by Peter J. Lucas, and watching him and Dean play off each other as Glower and Gabriel as the character’s relationship developers is the highlight of the game’s story.

Peter’s biggest role outside of this game is Piotrek Kroll, from the David Lynch film ‘Inland Empire’. He also played a Russian reporter from ‘Independence Day’ and a Russian buyer from “Cradle 2 The Grave”, so he seems to have been pigeonholed as that guy you hire if you need someone to play a Russian basically. He’s mostly had bit parts throughout his career, but he still seems to be acting on and off as of writing this. He also had done some musical training along with acting and has appeared on a reality show about dancing, so he’s clearly had a well rounded career on stage and on screen

I know that the acting and special effects can be seen as pretty cheesy these days, especially since the overall quality of games has gone up in the 25 years since this game has come out and the budgets of the big budget studio games has skyrocketed, but the cutscenes in this game still hold up fairly well, clearly showing off the ambition that the developers have, regardless of the videos being small, interlaced, and having a low framerate.

‘The Beast Within’ doesn’t have the agonizing nails on a chalkboard first-year level hammed up acting or amateurish screenwriting like 95% of the games coming out at the same time. that would have been laughed out a 10-year olds school play.

I know that comes across as pretty backhanded, and I admit that it kind of is, but “The Beast Within” stands out from the rest of the FMV games of the time and is actually enjoyable the entire way through.

The few FMV games that still come out have been relegated to the indie scene and are a rarity in the modern era. Despite having internet speeds that now allow games like ‘The Beast Within’ to be downloaded or Blu-Ray discs to contain all of that footage, it’s still much easier to make assets instead of video due to the ease it can be reused throughout a game.

And while the technology to actually film them and show them in a game has significantly improved, none of them have had the budget to replicate something like ‘The Beast Within’, leaving it as something that probably won’t even be replicated ever again, leaving it feeling quite unique unless some rich millionaire somewhere has a specific interest in niche FMV games and money to burn.

While ‘The Beast Within’ doesn’t really retain much from the first game besides the characters, like the general look, the actors, and even tone in a lot of areas, going in a different direction with the FMV, it’s still a fantastic follow up to ‘Sins of the Fathers’. I’m pretty sure in the 25+ years since it’s first release, fans have found much to appreciate about it, and since it’s initial release it has become a beloved cult classic and I would wholly recommend it to any adventure game fans.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-masterpiece-edition-2014/

I was originally going to look at both the original realMyst and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in the same article, but my look at the original realMyst was getting a bit wordy, so I split it up into two reviews.

Just like how the original Myst got an updated version with Myst: Masterpiece Edition, realMyst got an updated version of it’s own called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, that came out in 2014, 14 years after realMyst. Unlike how Myst: Masterpiece Edition was just the original but remastered, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a remake of realMyst in the Unity Engine, so it’s technically the second remake of Myst so far along with being a remake of a remake. Plus it was made on the Unity Engine instead of a proprietary engine, so it ends up being less of a beta test for a whole new engine and more of a proper remake.

This time around there’s not much new to say about realMyst, so this is going to be shorter than my looks at the original Myst and the original RealMyst.

Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here and my look at the original realMyst can be found here. The game pretty much contains all of the new content that the original realMyst introduced, including a whole new Age called Rime and better connections to the new Myst games along with the books, so it’s not like you’re missing out on content if you skip over realMyst.

This time around, the controls for realMyst: Masterpiece Edition are more in line with what you would expect from a first person game. The WASD keys are use to walk and mouse to look around. This time around the game forgoes a dead zone in the middle of the screen for the cursor and you just point and click at what you want to interact with. There’s still a little bit of a quirk to it’s design though. To interact with with objects, you right click to freeze the camera to move around the cursor around the area of whatever you’re looking at, and then right click again to go back to moving the camera.

It feels like this is what the original realMyst was trying to do with it’s controls but the developers just couldn’t execute due to their unfamiliarity with first person controls. I still feel like being able to interact with objects without freezing the screen should have been an option, but considering that it runs a lot smoother than the controls in the original realMyst, I can’t really complain too much, since they work fine.

But realMyst: Masterpiece Edition adds in a new gameplay option called ‘Classic Mode’, in which you can navigate the game the same way as the original, but instead of using still images to get around, the game instead mimics the still images by recreating their angle and position in the newer engine. Moving around in this mode can cause a little bit of whiplash when moving around since the game it clearly wasn’t designed with it in mind as the optimal way of moving around, but it’s still a neat little retro throwback. Plus if you’re using the ‘Classic Mode’, holding down shift brings up the still image of wherever you are from the original Myst, allowing you directly compare both the original and the remake, showing off what 21 years of advancement in games looks like.

This time around, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a lot more polished than the original realMyst. It wasn’t always quite so polished though, as the original release of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition was known to crash quite often, but since then the game received a 2.0 update that fixed pretty much all of the bugs and added a bunch of graphical features and updates.

This version of realMyst keeps the day-night cycle that the original realMyst introduced, but with a few changes. The day-night cycle doesn’t happen as quickly as it does in the original realMyst, making it feel like you’re actually spending days in the world of Myst instead of the game just showing off a fancy new graphical feature. The nights in Masterpiece Edition are much darker, way too dark. To compensate for this, the developers added a flashlight. I feel like having a flashlight doesn’t really fit with Myst’s whole aesthetic. If you had to use something, why not a lamp?

There are times when the full moon comes out and brightens up the area to some degree, but it’s still way too dark. I feel like making night not be so dark could have easily fixed this, and you still could have had slightly darker nights when the moon wasn’t out.

Various other changes have also been made across the game. The Stoneship Age is now more stormy than it was in the original realMyst, and thanks to the change to a newer engine, it actually looks more like a storm. The Selenitic Age had it’s day-night cycle removed, but the Channelwood Age now has a day-night cycle. And the moon in Channelwood is now massive.

My only complaint with the graphics is that they left out the whales in the Rime Age, which added a nice bit of atmosphere to that location.

realMyst: Masterpiece Edition does look pretty good for being a game being made by a smaller team.

But just like how the original realMyst re-uses the video files from the original Myst, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition once again uses those same files, in all of their highly compressed glory. And if they were looking a bit shabby by the year 2000, they’re definitely not looking so hot when 2014 rolled around, a whole 21 years after the release of the original Myst, especially since another game came out from another high-profile (for a game series know for having FMV) game series with live action actors, “Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure”, coming out the same year, along with a few other lesser known titles, like “Roundabout” and “Missing: An Interactive Thriller”, and “LocoCycle” coming out the year before.

The thing is that by this point, not only have video games moved on from the CD to DVDs and now digital distribution, but affordable cameras that small teams have also increased in quality, with even the iPhone 6’s recording quality being decent for a consumer grade camera for the time, so I don’t know why these videos weren’t updated for this release. Maybe the developers just didn’t have the budget to got back and update them, and I can’t really get annoyed for something that was probably out of their control.

realMyst: Masterpiece Edition overall is a much better experience than the original realMyst, with better graphics and controls, while keeping the content that realMyst introduced. While I do have a soft spot for that original version of realMyst, I have to recommend this over the original version, not only because it’s the most widely available, but it’s the best version of Myst at the time of it’s release.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/inner-chains-2017-pc-review/

In 2014, Scorn was announced with a trailer showing off it’s H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński inspired horror landscape and managed to get a fair bit of excitement for it’s release based purely on it’s art style and atmosphere. But unfortunately for the people looking forward to it Scorn took 8 years for that game to eventually get released. And those 8 years were enough time for another studio to come in and develop and release a game to fill that void that the original Scorn trailer had left, which is where Inner Chains comes in. Having a Kickstarter in 2016, 2 years after Scorn’s initial trailer, which went onto be successful, Inner Chains eventually went onto to be released a year later in 2017. Clearly not only taking the same inspiration from the same artists for it’s creepy landscapes, it also took inspiration from that initial trailer for Scorn by having biomechanical weapons and other tech throughout the game, which I’ll talk about later.

Set on in a distant future on a planet alien from what it once was, mankind has lost it’s control over nature and nature is reclaiming what it once had, turning the ancient technology into biomechanical beings, creating a strong symbiosis between technology and nature, and what is considered living and what is considered mechanical is getting difficult to distinguish. But slowly mankind has once again become an important part of the ecosystem. However, it hasn’t quite regained the level of development that it once had and is oblivious to it’s own history, unable to comprehend or control the powerful technology at it’s disposal.

As one of the inhabitants of this world, your head is filled with the teachings of the Ruling Caste. Your only goal is to get to a mythical place called the Last Hope and leave this degenerated, dying planet once and for all. You embark on your journey full of fanatical zeal, but soon it becomes clear that nothing is what it seems in this strange world.

Right off the bat Inner Chains is pretty solid when it comes to it’s aesthetics. As I mentioned earlier it uses H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński as it’s inspirations and while it it’s trying to ape on what Scorn did to a certain extent, it does give the game a distinct art style that not a lot of games have in general, and is much appreciated. The game even tries to show off the scale of the desolation of the planet by showing you glimpses of a building off in the distance that seems to loom over you throughout the game. It also helps that pretty much the entire game comes across as a heavy metal album cover.

The game also has tablets that you’ll come across throughout the game that when you interact with them they translate one letter of the in-universe alphabet into English, which is clearly meant for a second playthough so you can get all of the story. Even if you don’t translate 100% of the alphabet, you could still probably get the gist of what’s going on.

Unfortunately the presentation is where a lot of my compliments end and a lot of problems start rearing their ugly head.

While the game has some exploration and minor puzzles, such as using your electricity gun to shot distant buttons or using the flamethrower to burn something that gets in the way, most of the game is combat, and that combat is mediocre at the best of times, clunky the rest of the time. The game gives you the options of a gun that shoots electricity, a flamethrower, and a bolt gun, all of which you can use to stun your enemies and then use melee when you get close to the to save ammo. To get ammo, the game has these organic looking ammo dispenser that each give out ammo to a specific gun along with regenerating your health, both of which are limited. I didn’t have too much trouble with the combat but it left much to be desired.

Enemies range from close combat melee focused enemies such as zombies and these dog like creatures to enemies that have the same weapons you do, such as guards and doctors with the electricity guns, and even a tankier enemy flamethrower that you can take out by shooting the gas tank on it’s back.

And two of the enemies are pretty much clones of two of the enemies from the original Half-Life. One of which is a clone of the Barnacle, an enemy on the roof that grabs you with it’s super long tongue and drags you into it’s mouth, and the other ones are these tentacles that are stuck in place. At least these two enemies in Inner Chains have obvious signs as to what they’re attack range are. You can even lead zombies near or kick them towards either of the Barnacles or Tentacles to take them out. You can take out both of these enemies if you need along with the others, so they shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Then there are the straight up bugs. There was at least one scene that I’m pretty sure was supposed to have more sounds to it since it inconsistent with what sounds were playing. And I’m pretty sure there was an area that I accidentally clipped through.

But the worst bug I encountered was the geometry not loading in a certain area. I uninstall and installed the game and the bug persisted. It wasn’t until I got a new computer that it fixed itself. I’m assuming it had to do with moving from a HDD to an SSD that it fixed the problem. I don’t know if it’s because it was of the hard drive or a completely new computer, but it was frustrating. I think it had to do with the way that the game loaded in new areas. It doesn’t help that this game also runs poorly, even on newer hardware.

Unfortunately I can’t really recommend this game. While it’s nice to look at, as nice as a depressing desolate wasteland can look like, and is atmospheric, it is stuck with an underwhelming plot that can only be discovered with a second playthough, which can end up being tedious because the whole thing is carried mediocre combat. About the only thing that it has going for it is that it goes for super cheap whenever a sale is going. And while Scorn had it’s fair share of issues, it was significantly more successful in what it was doing than Inner Chains.

https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-2000/

The tech behind video games during the 90s and into the early 2000s was rapidly evolving. Games had moved from 2D pixel art and still images for it’s graphics with limited beeps and boops for sound to being fully 3D and seen in real time with proper high quality audio that allowed for voice acting, sounds, and music along with other features such as being able to play videos, all of which became available through dedicated video and sound cards along with the CD being the hot new format and able to hold all of this brand new technology easily.

And Myst was released right at the beginning of these advancements, only really seeing the beginnings of these new strides. So a remake of Myst wasn’t too absurd, and 7 years later, in 2000, realMyst was released, a fully 3D version of Myst where you could see it from every angle and not just the ones the developers had to provide.

It was developed by Cyan with some help with Sunsoft, realMyst was developed on the PLASMA engine as a way to test it out for the upcoming and then unnamed Uru, which was released 3 years later in 2003.

But when realMyst was released, it was released to a lukewarm reception at best from reviewers and a less than warm welcome even from it’s own creators. Billed as the version of the game that the creators (Rand and Robyn Miller) would have made if the technology at the time was available, Robyn Miller later went on record to explicitly deny that this version of Myst was what they would have made, calling it a pointless remake and saying “I only saw realMyst after it was released. As a remake, it was a lapse of reason and directionless; overt merchandising of the original Myst. It definitely wasn’t how we originally envisioned Myst, as was promoted.” [SOURCE: Retro GAMER Collection Volume Five].

Even the original version of realMyst is no longer considered to be canon and has been delisted from every available digital storefront, being replaced with realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, released 14 years after the original realMyst. Thankfully I managed to get my version of the original realMyst from GOG before it got delisted, but the only way to find that version now is second hand or to sail the high seas of the internet. Since it’s probably never going to go on sale ever again and Cyan is not going to get a cent from it ever again, just buy the Masterpiece Edition and get the original realMyst through other means.

But was it really all that bad? Let’s jump right into it.

Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here.

Right off the bat, the original version of realMyst is buggy, even when it was released. Even the version that I luckily got from GOG, which is know for getting older games to work properly on more modern computers, or at least as best they can, still has bugs. I did have to some slight fiddling with the game to get it running smoothly, and even then it did crash on me once and when you alt-tab out of the game it crashes. It’s nowhere near the worst experience I’ve had getting an older game to work, but just be cautious about playing it. You kinda have to dedicate yourself to it without being distracted by stuff in the background of your computer.

The controls for the original realMyst are a little weird too. The default controls are W for forward and S for walking backwards, and shift lets you run, but no A or D for strafing. The left and right mouse buttons also move you back and forward too. There is also a dead zone in the middle of the screen where you can move your cursor around to interact with the world and if you try to move your cursor out of this dead zone you can move the screen. These controls are a little unconventional to say the least. It’s like the developers were trying to create a mix of first person controls and the point-and-click controls from the original.

These are changeable in the settings. You can increase the area in which your cursor can move, ranging from taking up the entire screen and only moving the camera around when the cursor hits the edge of the screen, which is pointless since you’re interaction with objects is still limited by the dead zone in the middle of the screen, to having the area that the cursor can move in effectively be so small that it’s closer to what standard mouse controls were at the time in that it moves the screen when moving the mouse at all, which is much more preferable method since you can still point and click on whatever you want without having to worry about the cursor dead zone.

The other option in the settings is the ‘Advanced Mappings’, which adds in strafing, so using both the ‘Advanced Mappings’ and no dead zone gets you the standard controls of every first person game. You can also change the settings of the walking, strafing, and cursor speeds too. Apparently the ‘Advanced Mappings’ were patched in after the games release too, which seems baffling in retrospective considering that it had be a few years since the release of Quake at this point and that was one of the biggest and most famous games on the PC at this point.

Weirdly enough, they’re not the worst controls that I’ve encountered throughout the years, both from games before and since, it’s still weird that they’re presented like this considering that a lot of games had made their way into 3D at this point. It could have been entirely a limitation of the engine or the developers didn’t quite get how to work a 3D engine yet.

But there are a few times where you’re walking up some stairs and the game takes some of the control away from them. Like the spiral staircase in the Stoneship Age. You don’t have to turn your camera to climb them, you can just hold forward and the game will turn you in the direction of whatever way the staircase is going. Turning around with the mouse on the staircase can get you a bit disoriented when the game tries to correct the direction you’re going up and down stairs. The same thing happens in the Channelwood Age when you’re going up and down the spiral staircases their too. Maybe there was a bug that interfere with the game where you couldn’t get get close to the edge specifically with the stairs without some weird glitch, or maybe it’s an aesthetic choice that mixes first person controls with point-and-click controls like I mentioned earlier. Again, it could either be a weird limitation of the engine this was the best thing that the developers could do.

Just like the original game, you can only carry one page at a time. I know it’s a hold over from the original game, but it does feel a little tedious, and only goes to show the limitations of the original game. But then again, if you could carry both pages, the time it would take to complete the game would be significantly cut down and the whole game would be over pretty quickly, so it’s a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.

Even the odd puzzle got an update. The elevation rotation puzzle has removed it’s drift from the original and stops when you remove your cursor from the lever. I know this is going to annoy some hardcore fan, and spending years playing Myst only for one of the puzzles to be made easier in an updated version of the game could make you feel like you’ve been wasting your time for years, but I’m more indifferent towards this change.

But realMyst is not completely without new content. Aside from the overhaul in graphics, which we’ll get to later on, realMyst comes with a brand new age for Myst fans to explore called Rime. If you’ve already familiar with Myst, you can easily get to it pretty quickly.

There are no new real puzzles to speak of since much like the rest of realMyst it’s was made more of a tech demo, but it’s still worth checking out since it still provides something for older fans. Since the original Myst, Riven had come out in 1997 and Myst III: Exile was still in development and wasn’t going to be released until the next year, so Rime was made as an attempt to connect the original game with the rest of the series, specifically Riven, by adding new lore.

I like the atmosphere of this new age. Unlike a lot of the other Ages, Rime is permanently stuck at night in a perpetual snowstorm, and even has whales that circle the island. It has a nice serenity to it. It actually tries to add something to the game instead of just being a 1-to-1 remake of the original with updated graphics. It might just be a selling point for the back of the box, but I still liked it.

But since one of the selling point of this remake are the real time 3D graphics, let’s dive into that. The moment you boot up the game the changes are almost immediate. Even the intro cutscene is in real time 3D, and there is a smooth transition picking up and opening the Myst book.

One you actually arrive on Myst Island, everything is now running in real time as opposed to the limited still images from the original game. They water actually has waves that crash into the store, and you can can see things moving in real time, such as the hands on the clock face of the clock tower moving when you turn the valves to solve the clock tower puzzle, and seeing the boat rising out of the water when you solve the connecting puzzle.

Even seeing the wildlife in real time is neat, seeing the birds fly around Myst Island outside of a compressed video is nice, and even Channelwood has newly added wildlife in the form of a frog that jumps into the water. The Ages still have that liminal feel, but just not quite as pronounced.

But the biggest selling point of realMyst’s graphics are the newly added day-night cycle and weather effects. If you spend any extended amount of time on Myst Island, the sun will actually go down and the game moves from daytime to nighttime. It actually looks quite nice when it happens, moving from a blue sky to an orange sunset to a purple night sky. And there are even small details when it moves over to night, such as the steps leading down to the dock having lights on them that turn off when the sun begins to set.

It varies from age to age, with the sunset in the Selenitic Age being more of a darker orange. The Mechanical Age has more of a lighter blue. The Stoneship Age now has a permanent storm, complete with lightening, thunder, and rain. I know that the ship being part of the rocks has a lore reason in that the Age was written when the author wasn’t quite use to writing Ages yet, but it does help explain why the ship couldn’t see the rocks or broken lighthouse.

Channelwood unfortunately doesn’t have a day/night cycle. Maybe it’s because the age has a bigger draw distance and the developers either didn’t have the time or couldn’t figure out to have a bigger draw distance and day/night cycle at the same time. All of these weather effects and changing of the time of day gives each age it’s own distinct feeling. It’s one of those details that the developers didn’t need to add, but it’s a much welcome one.

But aside from the obvious transition to real time graphics, realMyst includes other changes, specifically on Myst Island, that also connect with the lore of the series, not only the games but the books to, and I’m not going to spoil what for those unfamiliar to the series, but it’s another nice addition. It actually makes you feel like your making progress throughout the game. Or make you feel like your wasting your time if your not good at these types of games.

I know that a lot of Myst purists are going to hate me for saying this, and I don’t necessarily disagree with them, but I do like some of the graphical updates and changes in realMyst. I’m not saying they’re better by any means, but I do appreciate putting a little effort into the remake instead of just making a 1-to-1 remake just to leech money off of fans, which, considering the backlash even from it’s own creator, it probably still was that to some extent.

But that’s where the positives that I can say about the game end, and a lot of problems rear their ugly head.

The draw distance is awful in a lot of places. On Myst Island, you have to practically be on top of the trees for them to move from their low quality versions to their high quality versions. Plus the whole island has a fog on it, along with the other Ages. Games usually have the low quality versions of objects and parts of the map off in the distance and transition between them and the high quality versions smoothly enough when the player gets close enough to them that the player doesn’t notice.

This is done to have a game run a lot smoother since if all the high quality stuff was running constantly, it wouldn’t run smoothly on most computers. Which is extra bizarre here since Myst Island is quite a small area. Channelwood has a bigger draw distance, but it leaves Channelwood looking a little bit empty as a result.

And to make things worse, it ran poorly on computers at the time, even the high end ones, which was not exactly selling the game to many people outside of fans, since 4 years before Quake had came out, and many other games running in real time 3D had come out since then that ran smoothly on the same computers that realMyst would have had trouble running on. Plus, for some reason, the anti-aliasing doesn’t even seem to work, it won’t even let me enable it.

The game also includes the video clips from the original, the ones that featured actual people in front of a camera. They largely remain the same from the original game sans one. I’m assuming that the re-recorded it to make it more cannonical with the rest of the series like they’ve made certain changes elsewhere.

But since the release of the original game, there have been numerous games that used FMV footage of real actors actually appearing in front of the camera in the 7 years since the release of the original Myst. Maybe the developers didn’t have the money to properly update these videos, and the do look out of place, especially since better hardware and more space had become more plentiful in those 7 years, with even Riven having better looking videos 3 years before this, so going back to those videos was a little rough.

But on the upside, the audio quality, for all of the sound effects and music has been upped in quality, making the whole game sound much nicer. Maybe you could sit down in your favorite age and close your eyes and listen to the atmosphere while relaxing with a nice tea.

Even being optimistic, realMyst is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s less of a remake of a game and more like a failed experiment that was more concerned about being a tech demo and beta test for a new engine than a proper remake of a beloved classic point-and-click game. But it’s not completely without it’s merits. It’s neat seeing the whole game in 3D, and a fully 3D version of Myst could work, even if it’s just the original game over again.

Would I recommend the original realMyst? Not unless you’re nostalgic for it, want to seek it out for the sake of curiosity, or a completionist. Especially since other remakes have come out since the release of the original realMyst and the casual fan probably would just gravitate to the remake that’s going to cause the least amount of issues to play.

I can see why it was disowned, but I can’t hate it no matter what the reception to it is.

1993

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/11/a-look-back-at-myst-1993/

With so much time passing since it’s release, it’s hard to get across just how big Myst was back in 1993. It became the highest selling video game at the the time, selling over 3 million copies world wide, and was only surpassed by the original Sims 9 years later in 2002. And while the series has unfortunately gone to the wayside since it’s original game, it still has a place in gaming history.

When Myst was first released, it was so popular that it was the thing that finally got people to move on from the old 3 and a half inch Floppy Disks, which contained a meager 1.44 megabytes, to the then brand new format of CDs, which contained up to 700 megabytes on a single disc, hundreds of times bigger than what a Floppy Disk could ever hope to achieve, and Myst was the flagship title that really showed off what that extra space could do. High quality music, better looking graphics, characters being able to have voice acting that gave the characters more of a personality, and it even allowed for videos.

The version of Myst that I’ll be checking out is Myst: Masterpiece Edition because it’s the version that is the most widely available version of the game. It’s a remastered and updated version of the original game that came out 7 years after the release of the original version with remastered graphics and sound. Plus there isn’t any real reason to go back to the original version beyond nostalgia, curiosity, or if your a mega Myst fan.
Your first real look at Myst Island.

In Myst, you play as “The Stranger”, a nameless person who is a stand in for anyone playing the game, who comes across a book with the word MYST on it’s cover. After reading through the book, which describes a fantastical island, you come across the final page, which, to your surprise and confusion, contains a moving picture of the island that was described in the book.

After touching the image, you find yourself being teleported to the island. Now stuck there, you have no choice other than to explore the island. Located in the center of the island is a library that contains shelves of mostly burned books, which a few have survived and contain a brief history of the island, along with two other shelves containing one book each, a Red Book and a Blue Book.

When opening these books, you come to find that each has someone trapped inside them. Sirrus, who is stuck in the Red Book, and Achenar, who is stuck in the Blue Book. Both tell you to not trust the other one and to find the corresponding missing colored pages from their books and to bring them back to them. And this is where the game picks up.

You’re not only left to explore the island, but across the island are similar books to the one you originally came across called MYST, called “Ages”, in which colored pages are located. To gain access to each Age, you have to solve a puzzle to get to the book linking to that Age. Hints to these puzzles are not only located in the few normal books that survived being burned in the library in the middle of the island.

Myst is a first person point-and-click adventure game and it’s gameplay is about as basic as you would expect from a game likes. You point and click on certain parts of the screen to make your way through each location. It can be more accurately be described as interactivity than gameplay. There are a few spots that are a little confusing to navigate because it places you a direction that doesn’t always do a good job of setting up where you can and can’t go, but it’s few and far between. The game also comes with a feature called ‘Zip Mode’, which lets you quickly move around whatever location you’re in by hovering over where you’ve previously big and pressing a hot spot on the screen that’s indicated with the cursor changing from a hand to a lightening bolt. It can come in handy for those who don’t have the patience to click through each screen.

You can complete each Age in whatever order you want, who is both a burden and a blessing, which I’ll get into in a minute. You can read up on each Age in the previously mentioned library on Myst Island, so you don’t have to go into each new location blind.

But despite the fact that Myst is so simple in it’s gameplay and concept, it’s execution is where it starts to waver a bit. For starters, you can’t pick up both the Red Page and Blue Page at the same time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate design decision or a limitation of the software and/or hardware, but it effectively means you have to ‘complete’ each Age twice to get both pages to see what both Sirrus and Achenar have to say. Thankfully the game seems to leave all of the puzzles how you left them from when you played through each Age, so replaying them isn’t too bad.

A few of the Ages are easy to get through on a second play. The Channelwood Age (The one with all the trees) isn’t too bad since it’s just flipping a couple of switches and you’re back out of the Age in less than 2 minutes with the second page, but other Ages are a lot more aggravating. Thankfully, Myst also places you right back at the beginning of whatever Age you play no matter how many times you’ve played it before, which means that you can just skip replaying some puzzles, which helps speed the process along.

There are also a few other minor problems that scattered throughout the game, such as the telescope in the Stoneship Age (the one on the boat) being a bit finicky because in order to move it around you have to drag the screen to the left or right and there were a few times that I rushed and I accidentally clicked away from it a few times.

But the low point of the game for me is the Selenitic Age (the one with the rocket ship). A portion of The Selenitic Age has you playing through a maze. And for the players who might have picked this as their first Age to try and complete probably weren’t expecting to have to revisit locations on their first play through, resulting in some people not having mapped it out or not have it memorized. Unless you were one of the few who actually thought to map it out first time around, it just becomes a tedious slog. Having yo navigate a maze through sound cues sounds is a neat idea, but there has never been a good maze, even in the best of games.

It does actually fit with the rest of the Age, with there being noises for clues on how to get through the maze, but I had trouble discerning them from other noises in the maze and it was one of the rare times that I had to look up a guide for a game. I wasn’t going to spend hours of my life to grind out the maze or try to map it out, and I know it wasn’t just me because when I look up reactions to this game, it’s the only section for the game that other people used a guide for.

So the game does help guide you through the maze, but because mazes suck even in the best of games, it was still the worst section of a pretty enjoyable experience.

Myst: Masterpiece Edition also added a general map for whatever location you’re in that highlights anything that you need to pay attention to, which is great for those who are struggling to remember whats located where.

Myst was not the first game to make use of pre-rendered CGI stills for it’s graphics, with games such as ‘Alice: An Interactive Museum’ (1991) and ‘L-Zone’ (1992) coming out the previous years, and ‘The Journeyman Project’ (1993) and ‘Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure’ (1993) coming out the same year. But unlike those games, which go for more complex CGI and distinct art styles, Myst instead goes for both a more simplistic art style and more basic with it’s CGI. I’m pretty sure this was due to Myst having a smaller team size that reigned in the scope a bit, but it ends up working in Myst’s favor. And that’s not to say that the other games from the same time period looked bad or aged worse.

Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and eventual writer of his own pre-rendered adventure game ‘Starship Titanic’, was quoted as calling Myst a “Beautiful Void”, naming the trope in the process, when the game originally came out and it’s easy to see why. Interactions with other characters are kept to a minimum and in very specific circumstances, so you’re entirely left to exploring places that empty and have even been abandoned, essentially creating something akin to the feeling of kenopsia, having an eclectic aura, or being a liminal space a few decades before those terms took off and giving it this really distinct feeling.

This was also around the same time that polygons were starting to finally take off more on home computers and consoles. 1993 also had games like the original Star Fox for the Super Nintendo, which was also graphically impressive, and the previous year had the likes of the original Alone in the Dark. But as impressive as they were, no game at the time was going to come even remotely close to showing off what Myst was doing in real time. So the trade off is that while it wasn’t running in real time, it did make the game look impressive in other ways.

It looked so good that Cyan, Inc. released a screensaver with screens from the game, which was back when screensavers were a thing because computers didn’t go into a standby mode that turned the screen off, preventing the image to be burned into the monitor. And this screensaver even has exclusive images that didn’t make it into the game along with behind the scenes content. It’s the equivalent of a company today releasing a 10 hour video onto their YouTube video that’s just game ambiance.

1993 even had ID Software’s Doom, but it wasn’t until 3 years later in 1996 with Quake that having games running smoothly with polygons in real time that it was even feasible for both developers and consumers to work with, so Myst’s graphics were making the best of a very limited situation in multiple ways.

And to add to the other worldly feeling of the game is the memorable soundtrack of the game. Done by Robyn Miller, one of the two brothers who founded Cyan, Inc, a lot of the tracks from the soundtrack adds to the ambiance of each location you’ll visit as well as add to some emptiness that some of the levels create. But it’s not a constant throughout the game, as there are times where it pulls back and lets you just take in the ambient noises of each location, which includes the wind blowing through the trees, water lapping up on the shore, and whatever wildlife resides in a location to walking through some empty caves or through the empty corridors of abandoned buildings.

Both the music and ambient soundscapes show just how alone you are in these locations. Don’t worry, it’s not as creepy as I’m making it sound.

If you want to track down a copy of this game, I would recommend getting the GOG version since it comes with a program called SCUMMVM that means you don’t have to fiddle with anything to get the game running on modern systems. Just boot it up and play.

The original Myst is from a unique period of time where the technology of video games were making giant leaps, which Myst help to make popular. It might be a little rough around the edges compared to more modern games and somewhat limited by the technology of the time, but it’s an enjoyable little adventure game that clearly has the markings of a small team who had some big ideas.

Due to the previously mentioned success, Myst managed to become a franchise, with multiple sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, along with a book series, a comic series that was cancelled half way through its run, and a potential TV mini-series and movie projects that never seemed to get off the ground. After looking back at the original Myst, it’s pretty obvious that it was never really intended to be a franchise, but the developers took advantage of the success that they were given and ran with it.

It even spawned a trend of what were called “Myst Clones”, which all involved going through a series of pre-rendered images, or even worlds made up of photographs of actual locations or real-world sets, in a similar style to Myst. Adventure fans thought that Myst’s popularity would kill the adventure genre by making it “dumbed-down” and making the genre more accessible to more people, along with Doom, which came out the same year, which, according to adventure game fans at the time, required no thought at all to play. The irony is that Myst making it more accessible to people probably made it better because you didn’t have to deal with the genre’s non-stop use of awful logic for puzzles.

Considering that a lot of previous adventure games required brute forcing your way through a game, either because you could easily screw yourself over, wasting hours and even days of your life (I’m looking at you Sierra), or because it only made sense in the designers head and they didn’t take in consideration that that other people would be playing it, or both at the same time, both could mean that you could end up wasting tens of hours of time only to get frustrated and often confused, so a game that made logical sense was a warm welcome.

Myst was even popular enough for Disney to get in contact with Cyan to build a Myst themed island as Disneyland Florida, in which only a limited amount of people would have been allowed onto the island in any given day, with park goers having to figure out what happened to the islands last inhabitants over 11 acres of land, with the whole thing being non-linear, meaning that no two people would have had the same experience. But alas, that never came to be. But from the sounds of it, it probably would have had more success in the modern world of geo-caching and escape rooms.

The library from Myst Island even made it’s way onto an episode of The Simpsons, in the background of the ‘Homer3’ segment of ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ along with a snippet of the soundtrack, which in turn was featured in the IMAX film Cyberworld 3D, which was the film used to promote the then new IMAX cinemas. Unfortunately, you can’t see the film anymore since it only gets used to test out new IMAX theater before they’re opened to the public.

Looking back at the original Myst, it’s quaint compared to other games that have come out since it’s release, not only on a technical level, with games being able to easily be rendered in real time that look much better than even some of the later Myst games, but with how adventure games are now designed to be more accessible roughly 30 years later (as of this look back at the original Myst), which the original Myst helped to some degree, even with it’s own series, with it’s sequels leaning from the mistakes made in the original.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/03/05/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers-1993-review/

‘Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ is a point-and-click adventure game that came out in 1993, and was developed and published by Sierra On-Line for the PC and Mac and was released at the beginning of when Sierra was trying to break into more mature games, with both ‘Phantasmagoria’ and ‘Shivers’ being the companies other attempts at games aimed at older audiences, which were released 2 years later in 1995.

‘Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ was written and designed by Jane Jensen, who was given a great deal of freedom when writing and designing the game, with some help from company co-founder Roberta Williams. Jensen was previously a designer for ‘EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus’ and the writer and co-designer for ‘King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow’ along with Roberta Williams, as well as working on ‘Police Quest 3: The Kindred’ by doing some additional writing, and helped design ‘Pepper’s Adventures in Time’, which came out the same year as ‘Sins of the Fathers’.

Thankfully, the game is pretty easy to set up, as it runs in ScummVM just by selecting the folder that the game is located in, so you don’t have to fiddle with DOSBox, unless that’s your method of choice. The GOG version already comes pre-packaged with ScummVM.

But to tangent for just a moment, for some reason ‘Sins of the Fathers’ was released in one of the weirdest boxes for a game I’ve ever seen. While it did ship in the regular rectangular box that most games shipped in at the time, one of the boxes that ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came in was designed by a madman. Some even came in a trapezoid shape, which was already pushing it, but ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came in something completely different. I have no idea what shape this is. If the trapezoid shaped boxes already had trouble fitting on your shelf, then you’re going to need a whole shelf dedicated to putting this on it.
The puzzle box from Hellraiser wasn’t this complicated.

My pet theory is that someone at Sierra accidentally sent the work for the box designer to the puzzle creators instead and the puzzle creators didn’t question it and thought that it might be an Raster Rgg and sent it back without questioning it, and the person who sent it out in the first place okayed it assuming it would look like every other box for a video game, and by the time it was being printed it was too late to change and they were stuck with a bunch of copies of this game that looked like this.

‘Sins of the Fathers’ follows the titular character Gabriel Knight, a failed novelist with a string of unsuccessful paranormal mysteries under his belt that currently has writer’s block and owner of a book store located in New Orleans that sells rare books that’s barely any more successful than his novels. To overcome his writers block, Gabriel gets in contact with his childhood friend, Detective Mosley, who is currently working on a case referred to as ‘The Voodoo Murders’, hoping to use it as inspiration for his next novel. At the same time, Gabriel has been having vivid nightmares involving voodoo sacrifices that seem all too real.

To expand on the game’s story, ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came with a prequel graphic novel in the game box, back when games actually came in a physical box instead of being released onto current digital store shelves, that follows an incident from 1693 and follows a Schattenjager, German for Shadow Hunter, named Gunter Ritter as he investigates a series of brutal murders involving witchcraft. While it isn’t necessarily required reading to enjoy the game, it does fill in some of the background details as to what is going on in the game.

While it is a bit hard to find these days, it was eventually uploaded to Sierra Studio’s website, whis is unfortunately no longer up. But this was before the turn of the millennium and the comic is pretty low resolution compared to more modern scans of it. While digital version of the original game don’t come with the graphic novel for some reason, it should be fairly easy to find online through various websites. Eventually it was released with the 20th Anniversary Edition of ‘Sins of the Fathers’, which is nice, but that version of the game is for another day.

There was even a novelization for ‘Sins of the Fathers’ which was later released in the ‘Gabriel Knight Mysteries’, which included the first and second games, written by Jane Jensen herself. However, good luck buying a second hand copy of this collection or book, let alone at a reasonable price. It didn’t get re-released like the graphic novel did by being released as an extra in the 20th Anniversary Edition of this game, but there are digital copies of it floating around online and I don’t think anyone would mind people getting a copy of this book since there is no other way to get it.

I’d figure that I would briefly mention that ‘Sins of the Fathers’ uses a lot of real world history, including real life people, locations, and history as a basis for it’s story. The developers for ‘Sins of the Father’s have clearly done their research into the history of both Voodoo and the history of New Orleans and it’s entirely feasible that you could learn something about both Voodoo and the city of New Orleans from playing this game. Although, it has been more than 25 years since it’s release so it’s entirely possibly some information has been corrected and some blind spots have been filled in, but it could still be used as a jumping off point for it’s subject matter.

Gabriel’s rare book shop is even located on the famous Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and looking at Google Maps, the game looks pretty accurate to the real world locations that are featured on the game’s map, barring Gabriel’s book shop of course since that isn’t real. Well, accurate for 1993 at least. I might actually write up something about the real world locations in ‘Sins of the Fathers’ since I had fun looking it up for this game.

The game obviously follows the previously mentioned Gabriel Knight, a womanizer and ladies man who has enough charm to work his magic on any woman he fancies. Mostly. Did I mention that this game was written by a woman? The only person to resist his charms is Grace Nakimura (outside of that one female cop later in the game), Gabriel’s assistant. It’s pretty obvious that Grace was written to be Gabriel’s inevitable love interest who is clearly in denial about her feelings towards him, but we don’t actually see Grace actually falling for him at any point, which is refreshing. Grace is smart, sarcastic, and doesn’t take any of Garbiel’s shit, which makes her my favorite character by default.

During Gabriel’s investigation, we soon come across several other important characters, including Detective Mosely, which is Gabriel’s Childhood friend and the sole reason that Gabriel is able to not only get information about the Voodoo Murders, sometimes Mosely giving up the info freely, but mostly Gabriel getting it through other more less than legal means, taking advantage of their life long friendship.

But there are more interesting characters related to the events of the Voodoo Murders. One of those people is Malia Gedde, who Gabriel Knight first notices as she is passing by one of the crime scenes of the Voodoo Murders, taking interest in both the crime scene and Gabriel the moment she see’s him. The other is someone who claims to be a distant relative of Gabriel and is trying to get into contact with him, but Gabriel brushes it off.

You’ll also meet several more characters throughout the game, all of which are unique and memorable in their own ways. Some of which are a lot more dangerous than they seem.

When ‘Sins of the Fathers’ was original released, CDs were becoming the hot new thing, allowing for up to 700 megabytes per disc instead of the incredibly limited 1.44 megabytes that the floppy disc had. And while ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came out on floppy discs, it also came out on CD. But instead of simply taking advantage of the extra space that CDs allowed by reducing the game from a whole 11 floppy discs to just putting 1 CD into your system, it also came with a bunch of other neat additions too. Not only did the Cd version come with a fully animated intro (well, fully animated by the standards of 1993), but it also came with a short video detailing the making of the game, which is a rarity for games in the modern era, let alone in the early 90s. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with the digital re-release of the game.

But the biggest addition with the CD version of ‘Sins of the Fathers’ is that it adds voice acting for every single line of dialogue throughout the game. All 3700 lines of dialogue.And not only did Sierra put up the money for voice actors, but they went all in and hired actual movie and TV talent for the game.

The titular Gabriel Knight was voiced by Tim Curry (Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)), Detective Mosely was voiced by Mark Hamil (Star Wars (1977)), Grace Nakimura was voiced by Leah Remini (The King of Queens (1998-2007), Dr. John was voiced by Michael Dorn (Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)), along with Desk Sgt Frink and a few miscellaneous characters throughout the game being voice by Jim Cummings, who has had over 550+ voice credits as of writing this review and has voiced everything from Whinnie The Pooh to Pete from Goof Troop to Darkwing Duck

And finally, the character of Wolfgang was voiced by the late Elfrem Zimbalist, Jr., who has voiced Alfred from “Batman: The Animated Series” (1992-1995), starred in the movie “Airport 1975” (1974), along with the long-running show “The F.B.I.”, which lasted 241 episodes over 9 season, and ran from September 19th, 1965, to April 28th, 1974, a whopping 9 years.

But despite playing as Gabriel Knight, the developers decided to go with a narrator to read all of the descriptor text instead of having the character read all of it. Which, considering the amount of text in this game, it’s pretty reasonable.

The narrator is played by the late Virginia Capers, an accomplished actress who has appeared on Broadway and has made various movie and TV appearances throughout her career. From everything that I’ve read about the game, the narrator is the only character (she’s not really a character, but she leaves one hell of an impression) that people seem to complain about, and by the end of the game, I sadly kinda agree, at least to some extent.

Virginia’s line readings can be a bit slow and I had already read through whatever line she had been reading before she had even got half way through it. But I did still enjoy her line readings, which were wonderfully sarcastic at times, even if they were still a little bit long in the tooth by the end of the game.

There is an option to turn the narrator off in the game’s settings, so if her performance does grate on you, you don’t have to listen to her throughout the game.

‘Sins of the Fathers’ looks great for an adventure game of it’s time, mixing film noir with the styling of a graphic novel, and it does it quite well. Sure it wasn’t going in on the shiny new pre-rendered 3D like a lot of the adventure games were doing at the time, like “Myst”, “The 7th Guest”, and even more obscure adventure games like “Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure”, or going all in on the FMV trend like “Dracula Unleashed”, “Return to Zork”, and “Police Quest: Open Season”, which was also developed by Sierra, along with the previously mentioned “Myst” and “The 7th Guest”, all of which came out the same year as ‘Sins of the Fathers’, but the mix of pixel art and obviously painted backgrounds used as a basis for the backgrounds holds up a lot better that the now incredibly dated early pre-rendered 3D and cheesy acting of the FMV games.

There are even times in the game when an important even happens in the game and it switches to a graphic novel style cutscene made up of comic panels that highlight turning points in the story or feature important information for the plot, and they really add to the games atmosphere. The game also draws it’s inspiration heavily from the 1987 film “Angel Heart”, obvious from the way the first day of the game starts, an excellent film that anyone who is a giant fan of this game should check out if you haven’t yet.

If you’re a newer point-and-click adventure game fan deciding to leap into some of the point-and-click classics, then fair warning because ‘Sins of the Fathers’ uses something called a ‘dumb cursor’. A ‘smart cursor’ automatically selects whatever action is required for you to interact with something, where as a ‘dumb cursor’ is a cursor that lets you pick what action to use with whatever object, person, or place you’re trying to interact with.

A boot is or walking, the mask is for looking, the text bubble with a question mark is for asking questions, the text bubble with exclamation mark is for talking, the hand is for picking up, the door is for opening a door to something, the gears are for using something like a light switch or chair, the hand knocking something is for moving something, the pouch (it looks like an envelope) is the inventory, and the tape recorder is obviously the tape recorder.

Some of these cursors could have easily been combined. I feel like it’s pretty obvious that when I hover my cursor over the point on the screen where you have to either move to a different area or screen that I clearly want to move to that area, and the fact that I have to differentiate between opening a door and walking through a doorway that is already open is kind of annoying. Clearly I don’t want to unscrew the door from the doorway and take it with me.

There are points where I naturally want to use the hand icon to either use something or pick something up, but you have to use the ‘operate’ cursor instead. As much as I’ve always appreciated the fluff dialogue in older point-and-click adventure games, I’d rather seek it out than have to hear it every time that I accidentally use the wrong cursor.

You can right click to cycle through all of the cursors, but I quickly found myself just using the drop down menu not only because I found myself accidentally cycling past a cursor that I wanted to use by accident, doubly so when I had to do something in a quick time frame, but using the drop down menu paused the game to let you properly find the cursor that I wanted to use without having to worry about finding the right one in time for the small window of opportunity to narrowly dodge an event that would have killed me and given me a game over screen.

Apparently the cursors were designed like this because Sierra was getting letters about how ‘smart cursors’ assume too much about what the player wanted to do, like instead of just picking up a jar the character just opened it instead, and the players just wanted more control over the game.

Also, there are also several points throughout the game where you’re required to use something from your inventory and use it on something in the environment or with another character.

But my favorite part is having to learn Voodoo Code. At one point in the game, you’ll need to learn how to use Voodoo Code and Drum Code, the Voodoo Code to write a message, and Drum Code to translate a message, both requiring you translate to corresponding symbols and sounds to letters and words. It adds an extra layer to the puzzles to make them feel like they were properly designed around the plot and subject matter instead of just shoving puzzles in simply because it’s an adventure game.

Unfortunately, some of the puzzles still have a touch of the classic Sierra moon logic going, but I guess there wasn’t any escaping that from even the most sensible Sierra games.

I know that this game was released in 1993 when adventure games were still known for having some moon logic puzzles, but Gabriel Knight is clearly trying to tell a proper story, and some of the more out there puzzles cause a slight whiplash when it comes to the tone.

For example, one of the first puzzles in the game requires you to use a thermostat in the police station so that Detective Mosely takes off his jacket and puts it on the back of his chair so that you can fish out his detectives badge from it’s pocket. The way you do this is after he’s taken his jacket off, you have to ask him ‘politely’ to get you a cup of coffee.

This is all in character for Gabriel to do and makes logical sense. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really get across that this is what you’re supposed to do. The game could have easily had Gabriel, or the narrator, to mention it offhandedly directly or indirectly in a line of dialogue. It doesn’t help that the thermostat blends in with the background of the game and the only way you’re going to know that it’s there is to mouse over it and for it to pop up with text.

Which also highlights the fact that there is some minor pixel hunting in this game. For the most part, the game does a fantastic job conveying the player what is what, but the game still has some limitation with the hardware from the time.

Thankfully, there is some wiggle room with what you can do on which day of the game that you’re up to. It’s like whoever developed the puzzle went went through all of the hoops to make sure that the puzzle made logical sense, but tripped up at the finish line and completely forgot that there was an audience playing the game and forgot to tell them about the puzzle.

Thankfully the game doesn’t put you into any death traps that you’re completely unaware of, setting you back hours and undoing all of your hard work and progress where you don’t have the slightest clue what you did wrong. But of course, you still have to go with the old adventure game adage of “Save and Save Often”.

I could easily see someone taking a peak at a guide or walkthrough at some point during their playthough, and I wouldn’t really blame a few people who had no experience playing older point-and-click adventure games.

But both the most important and infamous part of the game is the interrogation mechanic. While you’re interacting with other characters, there will be several characters important enough to the story that when you use the ‘Ask’ cursor on them, a list of questions pops up that allows you to ask very specific questions about any relevant information that you’re looking for, and any information you get about a subject that you get from one character can be used when asking questions to another character, meaning you’ll have to go back and forth between a few characters before you’ll get all of the relevant information.

Thankfully at the beginning of the game Gabriel does get a tape recorder in the mail which automatically records all of the conversations that you have with other characters throughout the game, meaning that you don’t have to constantly take notes. I know that some long time adventure game fans love their note taking, but when you have no idea what information is relevant and when, this is a godsend.

And it also lends to more realistic conversations too, as some characters tell you in an annoyed tone that they don’t want to have to repeat themselves over and over again, which pokes fun at the fact that adventure game protagonists are know for repeating themselves when asking a question by having the characters give realistic reactions to how annoying this would be in the real world.

There are still a few minor nitpicks I have with the game though that I thought that I should mention. These might not bug you like they do me, but I thought that I should bring them up anyway.

You have to wait for some animations to complete before you’re allowed to do something else like use your inventory or interact with something or someone else. I think this is more a weird quirk of the engine more than a bug, but it’s mildly annoying at times when you’re at the more time sensitive moments.

Gabriel’s walking speed is also a tad slow. It took so long for him to get from A to B in some places that I used this time to make notes for this look a the game that during these moments, including this complaint that I’m making right now.

A later part of the game has you going through not quite a maze, but it can get slightly confusing if you’re not paying attention and get turned around, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

While Gabriel Knight: ‘Sins of the Fathers’ did receive great reviews when it was released, it wasn’t a commercial success, only selling around 300,000 copies by December 1998, a whole 5 years after it’s initial release, which was depressingly low even at the time. One of it’s competitors in the adventure genre, Myst, sold millions of copies and got people to adopt a whole new technology with the CD. But thankfully due to it’s positive response Sierra decided to greenlight multiple sequels anyway, which is great because it would have been a shame if Gabriel Knight ended at one game.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/the-7th-guest-25th-anniversary-edition-2019-review/

While it might not be as well known 25 years after it’s release as it was when it was first released as it has been overshadow by two and a half decades of games that are either just as influential or have become significantly more popular, but ‘The 7th Guest’ and definitely left it’s impact on the industry by helping push it forward as I have discussed in my original review. It certainly has left enough of an impact to gain a cult following and be respected enough to get a remaster in the form of ‘The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition’.

I’m just going to go over the differences between the original and the remaster, since otherwise most of this review is just going to be an almost exact copy of the original.

Since the plot is the exact same as the original game due to the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ being a simple update, I’ll just copy and paste the plot synopsis here since there’s no point it re-summarizing it.

The lengthy intro flashes back to the year 1935, showing a drifter by the name of Henry Stauf, who steals whatever he can from small business that he comes across going from town to town., as he is in the middle of killing a woman just to steal her purse. Soon, he finds himself having a beautiful doll, and the next day he begins carving it.

He trades the doll to the owner of a local tavern for food, drink, and a place to stay. He soon has more dreams of toys, each more elegant than the last, and he soon starts making a lot more money, eventually becoming a successful toymaker. He uses his fortune to build a mansion at the edge of town. However, the children who had his toys begin to contract a mysterious illens and slowly die one by one. Apon hearing the news, Stauf disappears into his mansion and is never seen again.

In the present time, the character “Ego”, who is a stand in for the character, wakes up in the Stauf Mansion without knowing how he got there. As you explore, you soon discover that the mansion is deserted of people, but has ghostly visions of the past, of six guests who were invited to the Stauf mansion, all of which have a wish that they want granted, and who have to solve puzzles that are far more dangerous than they seem to get their prize.

There was a booklet that came with the original game that came with a lot more detail about the history of Henry Stauf, the mansion, and each of the characters that you come across when exploring the mansion. Thankfully this comes with the 25th Anniversary Edition, which also comes with the original game too

The graphics largely remain the same as the original version of the game. The full motion video remains in all of it’s pixelated and interlaced glory. It’s much more noticeable since it’s now being shown on higher resolution screens, but hey, what are you going to do? The developers couldn’t really do much without going back to the original 3D renders of the mansion and original video files and completely re-rendering them to look much better on more modern screens, and unfortunately they didn’t get archived properly due to budget constraints on the original game, so this is the best that we’re going to get.

The game is now in proper widescreen. For the purists, you don’t have to worry about things getting cut off since the original game was presented in widescreen formatted for the square monitors at the time, so all the game had to do was zoom in. There is an option to toggle between a widescreen mode that has the game touching all sides of the monitor or the game having narrow black bars at the top and bottom, making it slightly thinner than 16×9, but showing everything from the image. It’s a tiny difference, but if a purist wants those extra pixels, the option is there.

There is an optional filter that you can turn on to smooth out the graphics to try and make them look a little less pixelated, but it just looks like a smudged mess to me, especially since the resolution of the original images and videos is pretty low compared to the more modern games released 25 years since the original release of ‘The 7th Guest’. There’s no real reason to apply a filter to a game so low res and pixelated. I’m pretty sure the graphics snobs weren’t going to play this anyway, but it is nice that it was included as an option.

All of the animations that play when you’re going from one area of the mansion to another are now sped up, making the process of exploring new areas along with revisiting the puzzles that you took a break from have become less tedious. This is the most significant and all around best update to the game, for me at least, since having to move around or backtrack in the original game was such a pain.

Also, the cutscenes in this game now can easily be skipped. Well, technically sped up like the transitional animations, but being able to skip through that intro cutscene on another playthrough is fantastic.

A small part of me misses the slower animations. It was as if the character was slowly creeping throughout the mansion scared of what might jump out at them, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, like the developers were taking advantage of the limited speed of CDs when the game was first released. But if I had to pick between faster animation or the atmoshere, I would pick the faster animation ever time just because of how tedious the original was. It would have been nice to have a toggle to choose between them to appeal to the purists, but I’m fine with the faster animations.

Also, is it just me of is the spinning icon on the loading screen look like it’s spinning the wrong way?

The sound and music pretty much remains the same as the original game. There is an option to switch between a re-mastered version of the score or go back to the high quality Midi or Adlib, which is nice. You do have to load a game or start a new one to change it in the game though. This version does add in voice acting for German, French, and Russian, along with subtitles for those new languages long with subtitles for several other languages. I can’t speak those languages, but I hope that they’re equally as cheesy as the original acting.

Since the ’25 Anniversary Edition’ is almost exactly the same as the original, pretty much all of my complaints about the original carry over. From puzzles ranging from tedious but solvable to practically needing a walkthrough to complete, it’s not exactly the most warm welcome, but it’s entirely presented as it originally was, warts and all, so fans should be happy.

The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ mobile port, which has a HTML front end while the game is running on ScummVM, made obvious by the game’s credits. My only real complaint about this is that a few of the hotspots used to move around the mansion are a bit awkward to use. There is a way of highlighting which areas of the screen allow you to move around the mansion, but it took a while for me to get used to clicking on the right hotspots, taking me to a wrong part of the room or changing my view. It’s not egregious but it does take some getting used to.

It even comes with a bonus mode called “Open House Mode” as an unlockable. It doesn’t allow you to actually wander around the house and do whatever you want, it only allows you to solve any puzzle from the game again without having to wander around the house.

The one thing that I have to point out is that this is based on the mobile port of the game. Not the original mobile port, since several puzzles were removed in that version because of the size of mobile devices at the time, with the infamous microscope puzzle getting it’s own version on mobile devices. So if you’re reading any reviews talking about missing content, you can ignore those parts of the review.

But is the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ of ‘The 7th Guest’ worth playing? If you’re into old adventure games and are fine with dealing with some of the frustrating quirks of old adventure games, then yes. Is it worth playing over the original? Also yes. The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ is enough of an improvement in my opinion that I would recommend playing it over the original, since it removes a few of the frustrations of the original game.

And if you’re a purist, the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ comes with the original game as a free bonus anyway, even if it’s weirdly hidden away as DLC in the Steam release.

But because of the flaws inherent to the original game, I can’t exactly recommend this to a lot of people outside of the people who are already fans of the original or people who are fans of 90s adventure games and all of the hair pulling puzzles that was part of the genre back in the early 90s. There are way too many puzzles that either rely on luck or aren’t clear with their logic that make it a hard game to recommend to a lot of people.

Maybe watch a retrospective or playthrough if you’re curious but don’t want to put up with the puzzles.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/a-look-back-at-the-7th-guest/

It might not seem like it now with more than 25 years of advancements in computer tech allowing for some fantastic looking games, but ‘The 7th Guest’ helped to push a lot of advancements of it’s own, not only graphically, but technologically as well. Released in 1993, ‘The 7th Guest’ was one of the few games at the time to be exclusively released on CD, just like it’s just as influential competitor Myst, which came out around the same time. Moving from the limitations of the 1.44 megabytes of 3’5″ floppy discs up to the 700 megabytes of the CD, roughly 500 times bigger in size, a jump in storage never seen in physical media ever again.

It did just a good job of pushing tech forward that Bill Gates himself called the game “the new standard in interactive entertainment”, which are pretty big shoes to fill.

The game was conceived by Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros, who met in 1988 while working at Virgin Games, and who both had a love of making games. They liked working together and would often watch moves while they worked, one of their favorites being ‘The Shining’. Soon they hatched a plan for a new game of their own, inspired by shows like ‘Twin Peaks’ and the board game ‘Clue/Cluedo’, and wanted to make something with a similar tone.

They handed the idea over to Martin Alper, president of Virgin Games, over lunch, who said that it had failure written all over it since he thought that gaming’s future was in cartridges, and fired them on the spot. And we all know how well cartridges went. Well, technically they weren’t fired, but they were now free agents. Soon they were under a new banner at Trilobyte Games, so if they failed, it wouldn’t look bad for Virgin Games, who would still publish the game.

He gave them three conditions with making the game. It had to ship on floppy disc, they had to work 30 to 40 miles from where martin was, an they had to make the game in 6 months. Of course, none of this happened, and 2 years later ‘The 7th Guest’ made it’s way onto store shelves.

The lengthy intro flashes back to the year 1935, showing a drifter by the name of Henry Stauf, who steals whatever he can from small business that he comes across going from town to town., as he is in the middle of killing a woman just to steal her purse. Soon, he finds himself having a beautiful doll, and the next day he begins carving it.

He trades the doll to the owner of a local tavern for food, drink, and a place to stay. He soon has more dreams of toys, each more elegant than the last, and he soon starts making a lot more money, eventually becoming a successful toy maker. He uses his fortune to build a mansion at the edge of town. However, the children who had his toys begin to contract a mysterious illness and slowly die one by one. Upon hearing the news, Stauf disappears into his mansion and is never seen again.

In the present time, the character “Ego”, who is a stand in for the character, wakes up in the Stauf Mansion without knowing how he got there. As you explore, you soon discover that the mansion is deserted of people, but has ghostly visions of the past, of six guests who were invited to the Stauf mansion, all of which have a wish that they want granted, and who have to solve puzzles that are far more dangerous than they seem to get their prize.

There was a booklet that came with the original game that came with a lot more detail about the history of Henry Stauf, the mansion, and each of the characters that you come across when exploring the mansion. Thankfully this comes with the 25th Anniversary Edition, which also comes with the original game too.

The game was written by novelist Matthew Costello, who was brought in to write the games story, whose most recognizable book is ‘Murder on Thames’, the first book in the long running Cherringham series. He also wrote the novelization of ‘The 7th Guest’, which fills out a lot of details of the game, with the first half of the book following the characters before moving onto the story of the game itself and it actually came on the re-release of the game along with being a downloadable extra with the 25th Anniversary remaster of the game, so getting a hold of it is pretty easy.

It’s hard to get across just how good ‘The 7th Guest’ looked when it originally came out back in 1993. Yes, it was entirely per-rendered CGI for it’s still images and video and was made for a video game in 1993, but having a game be running in real time 3D graphics back in 1993 was extremely limited by the hardware at the time. The only way you were getting real time 3D games were either in arcades with games like Daytona USA or Virtua Fighter, games like Doom in the PC, or games like Star Fox on the SNES, which was only capable of it’s 3D through a special chip called the Super FX chip and even then it had a framerate that could almost be counted in seconds per frame. It’s not that it wasn’t possible, it was just incredibly limited.

And it was either the still images or pixel art as the only other options, and pre-rendered stills and videos were the only things that made sense for what Trilobyte Games wanted to do with their game.

White it’s quaint to see something pre-rendered from 1993 more than 25 years later considering that it could easily be outdone with the advancements in real time graphics that have happened since it’s initial release, with even phones in the 2020s being significantly faster than computers were in 1993, the pre-rendered backgrounds in ‘The 7th Guest’ have aged fairly well for the time that it was made in, with it’s graphics being stylized in such a way that prevents the aging that a more realistic style would have suffered from.

It really showed off what the extra space that the CD format could do for pushing video game graphics forward by having high quality images, videos, and sound all available on a single disc, even if it could still be bottle necked by the rest of the computer.

The game even presents itself in widescreen, even if it’s formatted to appear on the square monitors that computers were using at the time, so the developers were clearly confident that there game was so advanced that it was practically a movie. And much like a lot of games that were trying to be movies at this point, ‘The 7th Guest’ is a game filled with full motion video. And while that might sound dubious considering the reputation that FMV games have in retrospect, but it’s nowhere close to being one of the worst ones out there, not only in terms of being a game, but both it’s acting quality and gameplay quality.

It’s like watching an overly dramatic play, which was the style at the time since not only computer monitors were much smaller but the video quality was limited by the hardware computers at the time, which meant that the actors needed to do this to try and get across the intent of the acting and plot for the game for it to work. Plus it works in the games favor since the whole thing is pretty cheesy to begin with, intentionally or not.

Fun fact, the characters were never originally meant to be ghosts. It just turned out that with the quality of the video recordings, each character ended up having a blue aura around them when they were filming on the blue screen, so the developers made everyone into a ghost. Which is a sense of self-awareness that most developers who had Full Motion Video in their games lacked completely when it came to applying it to their games.

But my favorite part out of the entire game is the soundtrack. Entirely composed by George Alister “The Fat Man” Sanger, who has a small cameo in this game as a painting, along with David Sanger. George Sanger has done a lot of work in the video game industry, with a small sample of the games he’s worked on featuring ‘Maniac Mansion’ for the NES, ‘Loom’, ‘Wing Commander’ 1 and 2, ‘Ultima Underworld’, ‘Zombies Ate My Neighbors’, ‘Evil Genius’, and several Humongous Entertainment’s games just to mention a few, which is quite the career.

The games soundtrack ranges from the cheesy spooky vibes that you would expect from a game where you wander a haunted mansion filled with ghosts which only enhances the mood to tongue-in-cheek songs, with the notable example of “Skeleton’s In My Closet” performed by ‘The Fat Man and Team Fat’ and sung by Kris McKay, which plays during the credits, and is also featured on the album ‘7/11’ also done by ‘The Fat Man and Team Fat’, which is music from both ‘The 7th Guest’ and it’s sequel ‘The 11th Hour’. The whole soundtrack really is the stand out thing about ‘The 7th Guest’, and it even comes with the digital re-releases of the game, and I’ve been listening to it as I’ve been writing article looking back at the game.

While ‘The 7th Guest’ was technically impressive, from a gameplay perspective it’s a lot rougher. Moving from area to area is slow, mostly due to CDs at the time having slow read speeds, a side effect of adopting the new technology, and computers not being powerful enough to process a faster video. Meaning that going back and forth between puzzles was tedious at the best of times, frustrating at the worst if you just wanted to move on from a puzzle that you were stuck on. I know it’s a limitation of the technology at the time, but when you consider that other games just used still images instead of videos when moving from place to place, making the whole thing a lot smoother, it just feels like it’s the side effect of riding the bleeding edge of technology in a decade when technology was moving at lightening speed rather than a good idea. It was still impressive for the time though.

Calling the puzzles a mixed bag is putting it politely. A few of them are pretty easy and straightforward to figure out, like the heart maze or the cake puzzle. But then there are the puzzles that drive you up the wall. The piano puzzle is pretty much a ‘Simon Says’ puzzle where you have to press the keys in an ever increasing order, and if you mess up you have to start over again. This is incredibly tedious and sluggish, especially with the speed at which the game is limited to due to hardware limitations. These limitations also meant you couldn’t skip cutscenes either, so if you were replaying it just for the puzzles, you were out of luck and stuck with watching all of the cutscenes.

It’s also slightly confusing to get to some areas of the house with there being no obvious signs of where to go. If it wasn’t for me peaking at the achievements of the 25th Anniversary Edition, I would have had no idea that there were some unconventional ways of getting around the house to put it politely. You have to look at the floor in the foyer to get to the portraits room for example. I guess you would have seen it if you moused over it and the cursor changed, but I still would have been confused when a transitional animation played and suddenly I was in a room that was somewhere else. Even the room is detached from the rest of the house on the map.

Then there are the puzzles that range from trial and error to entirely luck based that are so obtuse that if takes way too long for you to figure them out.

The first infamous puzzle, and yes, I said first, was a puzzle so notorious in the adventure game genre at the time for it’s obtuseness that it ended up naming a trope for puzzles that not only obstructed the player from continuing but the player would have significant trouble figuring out the puzzle out on their own, even with major hints about the answer from the game itself. The puzzle in question is an anagram with letters placed on a soup can in the kitchen cabinet. In the modern era, this could easily be solved with brute force through an anagram decoder, but this would have been frustrating back in the day when it was released. It’s not as keyboard smashing as pre-1993 Sierra games were, which is probably it’s only saving grace.

This is a good time to mention that there is a hint book in the mansion’s library, which gives you three hints in order from a slight nudge to borderline telling you. If you use the fourth book, it just solves the puzzle for you, but you sacrifice a part of the story with the game just skipping over it. It doesn’t stop you from playing the game, you just don’t get that part of the story. And the third hint for this game pretty much requires using a thesaurus to solve, so you’re at bare minimum using a pen and paper to solve an anagram or spending 20 minutes looking through a thesaurus, and that’s if you even have one.

If anyone going through the history of video games for the first time is wondering why adventure games went from being one of the dominant genres in the medium to being more sidelined for more easy to grasp genres, it was less the fact that games like Doom and Wolfeinstein 3D were simpler action games for a wider audience, but more the fact that a lot of adventure games were filled with puzzles that frustrated people that most people pretty much gave up on the genre. And ‘The 7th Guest’ isn’t even the worst example.

Another infamous puzzle is the microscope puzzle, which was a problem but for entirely different reasons. This one involves going up an AI opponent. How the game’s logic works for the AI is that it uses the CPU speed to figure out the next couple of moves for the AI. The immediate problem with this is that in the next few years after this games release, CPU speeds skyrocketed, as did a lot of other tech at the time, meaning that the AI went from predicting a few moves ahead to predicting practically every move the puzzle could make, making the puzzle, and by extension, the entire game impossible to beat. It’s a pretty good example of not tying a game’s logic to the speed of what’s in your computer. The game still requires some luck in playing, but it’s not as egregious as other puzzles in this game. Thankfully emulators like ScummVM lowers the speed to what it was originally intended, making the puzzle perfectly playable.

But this puzzle still ended up being popular enough that it was released on it’s own on the iPad under the name ‘The 7th Guest: Infection’ by Trilobyte Games, where it can be played against Henry Stauf in a Single Player more or against another player, or in a demo mode where the game plays against itself. It sounds like a fun little time waster even though I haven’t played it for myself.

And then there are the puzzles based almost entirely on luck, like the picture flip puzzle, the coffin puzzle, and the portrait puzzle, which require little to no skill to beat but still require a lot of time playing them, making the player spend unnecessary time doing repetitive work. And to top it all off there is even a maze that you have to figure out. Every time you hit a dead and, Stauf mocks you by saying “Feeling lonely?”, which will happen often and start to drive you mad. And putting a maze in a game is a bad idea even in the best of games.

The game does try to give you hints to how the puzzle works are you’re playing them by having the character that you’re playing as talking to himself during the puzzle But he doesn’t do it just the first time that you’re trying to solve a puzzle, he does it every single time you start the puzzle over. And with every puzzle you’re going to hear him say the exact three or four things over and over and over again no matter what, making you press the space bar as quickly as possible to skip over the audio, which takes control away from you for a couple of seconds as he talks to himself.

And on top of that, Stauf taunts you every couple of moves in whatever puzzle you’re playing. It’s always the same line specific to each puzzle too. The taunting needed to be significantly reduced and the character dropping hints only needed to be played once and maybe brought up again every now and again as a reminder.

I feel like half of these puzzles are probably going to make the player just look up a walkthrough, and that’s if they haven’t already quit in frustration, and I wouldn’t blame them. Enough of the puzzles are actually fun and even the right kind of challenging to make a player invested, but so many others are just an exercise in frustration. Having to brute force your way through a game is never a fun time.

The whole thing just comes across as a game that has a mystery plot first adventure game second, with it’s aesthetic and tone coming first, gameplay second. All of the puzzles feeling so haphazardly strung together with how radically different they are in difficulty. And from what I’ve seen from the interviews from the creators, it seems like they just wanted to jump onto the CD as a technology first, with the game coming from what they could do with it rather than a good game first.

And since I have no idea where else to put it, some of the animations when moving around make no sense. You can click on a door that you want to go through but in order to move to it the game moves it another area first and then moves to the door that you originally wanted to go to because the animation to move to the door was only done from that angle. I know it had to to with the developers having a limited schedule and budget, but it still ends up being a frustration to the player.

Also, with a small aside, due to the era that this game was released in, if you click on certain spots in the game it plays a fun little animation, which is one of those things that developers didn’t have to do but did anyway because it’s just a fun thing to do.

At the time of it’s release ‘The 7th Guest’ managed to sell 2 million copies, which was an impressive feat at the time considering that CD drives weren’t cheap or readily available. Apparently it increased the sale of CD drives by 300% around the time of it’s release. It sold enough for the company to release a ‘Special Edition’ of the game which features a ‘Making Of’ video on the second disc, which is rare in games even today. This video also comes with digital versions along with other bonus downloads.

But when it comes down to it, I personally find it a little hard to recommend the game. While it’s considered significant game for a reason, it’s not for having good gameplay or a compelling story, but for pushing PC hardware forward which helped a lot of developers do a lot more with games down the line, which just make it feel like a tech demo more than a well thought out game.

‘Myst’ came out a few months after this and it’s puzzles were a lot better designed in that I could actually take notes and properly figure them out instead of having to brute force most of them.

‘The 7th Guest’ should be respected for it did but it should be respected from a distance. To be looked at but not touched. I know that’s a backhanded way to talk about a game, but sometimes time is not kind to some things, and ‘The 7th Guest’ is one of them, even if it does have it’s charm.

I'm a computer! Stop all the downloading!

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/virginia-2016-pc-mac-ps4-xbone-review/

You are investigating the case of a missing person investigation in the small idyllic town of Kingdom in the Burgess County of Virginia through the eyes of graduate FBI agent Anne Tarver. Together with your partner, seasoned investigator Maria Halperin, the two of you investigate the disappearance of a young boy who nobody seems to know how or why they vanished.

Before long Anne finds herself negotiating competing interests, uncovering hidden agendas, and testing the patience of a community unaccustomed to uninvited scrutiny. Throughout this journey you will have to make decisions which will shaped the course of Anne’s and Maria’s lives all while investigating a town that seems to have a dark secret.

From the outset Virginia is fantastically paced. Unlike other games in the so called “Walking Simulator genre” there is no meandering about or spending minutes or even hours wandering around the games location looking for either an object, character, or just the next location to be in for the next event to happen.

If anything it’s paced more like a movie with cuts from one location to another much like how a movie cuts from one scene to another, leaving the implication of characters moving from one area to another instead of just having the game force you to wander around it’s beautifully crafted location at the speed of someone who sprained their ankle.

And the game does all of this without any character saying a word, doing a fantastic job of showing instead of telling.

That being instead, while the first half of the game comes out swinging, having no fat and leaving me interested in what the game had to offer, the second half of the game completely lost me when a lot happened all at once that made little sense due to how much was unexplained.

It just comes across as the game doing too much too fast when the game suddenly goes from subtlety getting it’s characters intentions across to cranking it up to 11 and numerous things started happening that really needed some context. I know that the game is wearing it’s influences on it’s sleeve, but the things that it takes it’s influences from, namely Twin Peaks, were paced out more slowly and let the audience take things in as the show went on.

Maybe if Virginia was presented more episodically in nature and expanded things out with the same lean pacing it wouldn’t have been so jarring when the second half of the game started introducing several twists and turns to it’s more grounded story.

There is something here in Virginia, and I wish that I could say that it lives up to the potential of that something, but unfortunately it never gets to see it.