What have golf carts, smoking pipes, tweed, cream-teas, Jaguar cars, slippers, the Daily Telegraph and the game Myst all got in common?
That's right - they all relate to something you will do once you retire at 65 years old - or if you are British, when you retire at 120 years old. When your brain is nice and slow.
There are three things said about Myst. One of which is true - because it is said by me. Another is also true - but for all the wrong reasons and a third thing, well the third thing is a blatant lie.
First, the truth they say. Good grief - this game is boring. Dull. Dull to be fair is something of understatement. Myst is equivalent to a thousand years spent watching paint fester and peel from a wall. You see, to watch paint dry, perhaps, would instill a sense of anticipation, of hope, of interest, something Myst fails to achieve on an epic scale. God spent two billion years watching the Earth cool-down before he started making worms and cardboard and stuff - which must have been two billion years well spent compared to playing Myst for 5 minutes. Boring. Boring. Boring. Bor...
On to the second thing said. "Most successful game ever" -- must be good right? Most successful and all that? The people who perpetuate this myth must think most of us were born yesterday. Or at best the day before. Its so called success is easily attributed to a number of unassailable facts. Firstly Myst was the only game in 1991 that came close to taking advantage of the 660Mb of space available on a spangly new CD media. So what happened was this. All those people who had spent £700.00 ($1,200) on a blistering 1x speed CDROM had felt somewhat cheated, way back in '91, to discover that the sticker "CD enhanced game" meant one shiny disk as opposed to 4 blue floppy disks and other than that, the games were essentially identical.
MYST never made it floppy disk. The naive masses wanted something to justify the expenditure and sadly for them, Myst was that justification. So they bought it. In their droves.
Also don't forget back in '91 3D rendered images of my back-side, assuming it was available 'only' on CD, would have sold in thousands. Pre-rendered was cool. Briefly.
Finally, and most importantly, by 1994 Myst was bundled free with every CDROM. Ever. This meant by about the mid-nineties most humans who didn't scrape their knuckles when they walked probably had more copies of Myst adorning their homes, than say the official North Korean "We love Kim Young Il" fanclub have pictures of their beloved leader hanging from the shack walls.
So to final Myst saying. Or rather the most blatant lie since Micheal Jackson gave a negative response to the question "Did you ever have plastic surgery?" It goes something like this: Myst is a cerebral game. A thinking mans game. A game for the intellectual. Who - Lord God above please tell me - are they kidding? Myst relies on slow wits and reaction times a depressed slug with an aching back and some heavy shopping would find difficult not to achieve on the way home to nagging wife. After an hours play it shows all the progress of a decrepit and arthritic minded spastic monkey still pointlessly banging away on a typewriter with an infinite number of its buddies, blindly, and rather stupidly, hoping to top Shakespeare. It is slow. Very very slow going.
You see - Just because a games introduction contains a few pretentious words, it hardly qualifies it as an intellectual Olympics. In the end all it really proves is they own a Theosaurus. (Unlike me!)
In summary - If you want to be bored, listless, aimless and wander about picking up pointless items and wishing your time away - I suggest you go to place of employment.
There is no action. No guns. No aliens. No half naked women. No C-Class actors. No monsters. No animation. No jelly fish. No nothing. And the graphics have dated badly.
Is it rare? Is it? I'm too bored to comment.
3DO Kid.
