The Prince Of Swords

After I finished Everything Bad Is Good For You today, I decided to lift my personal ban on video games. I’d long avoided them since they tend to easily suck me into marathons of staring at a monitor in goal-oriented play. I didn’t have a copy of GTA or the Sims laying around, but I did have Riven from the mid-nineties. I dusted off 5 CD’s and little instruction manual and tried to load it on my XP desktop just for fun. Well…it almost worked but was jittery, and without sound and was really ridiculous seeing a 640×480 game run on a 20″ LCD. Firefox hooked me up with some other titles for classic and modern adventure games and I was off to Best Buy.

I cruised through the music section just to see if they had any new Adam Freeland or DJ Dan mixes, but no joy so off to the games. Judging by the number of rows of other types of PC games, adventures games are a much smaller market. Not surprising since I always seem to have an innate fringe taste in things. I grab the 10th anniversary Myst DVD version (that included Myst 1, Riven, Myst 3), Myst 4, Still Life, and Bad Mojo for just under $100.

The cashier asked, “Dude, are you a gamer?”

“I am today”, knowing he would have no idea what to do with that.

Myst 1-4 will be an interesting journey through the evolution of a game maker’s skills over the last decade. Still Life and Bad Mojo seem to have been released this year and hopefully close to state of the art. One is a crime scene game. The other is the typical drama of “you are a cockroach in bar trying to escape” type game.

To begin at the beginning, I loaded up Myst and it was like slipping into an ex-girlfriend. It all comes back. Zork. The Pawn. Sundog. Clunky navigation to move around a world of mostly static images, clicking on everything to see if the arrow will turn into a hand and give up the fact that something different can be done. Knowing nothing about this game, in three hours I already feel like I’m making good progress with no instruction and no flipping to Google for help. Turn the tower and write down the clues to open the different levels you reach by the linking books.

Gotta go now. Myst is calling and my mom will only let me stay up until midnight.