Let's Play

The story of Myst is pretty thin, although if you already know more of it (through the novels and later games) you can find subtle references to much of the backstory in Myst (though not nearly as much as in Riven). I've always been a big fan of games that completely immerse you in a fictional world and let you explore and piece together the story yourself from lots of little clues. No games do that better than Myst and Riven. In Myst, while you're ostensibly off finding pages of the blue and red books, your true goal is to find all the clues so at the end you can make the decision which of the brothers to trust.

For Riven, the Miller brothers got help from Richard vander Wende, a former ILM employee who revolutionised not only the visual style of Myst, but also the way the designs were done. He advocated "character driven design"; nothing in Riven was made without giving careful thought as to why the characters would've made it like that. As a result, everything has a story to it and reveals a little bit more about the people and the history of Riven. I tell you what I know in these videos, but I'm sure even that is just scratching the surface of the depth of design put into this game.

While I agree the mode of movement is old-fashioned, even in 2009 (let alone 1997) real-time 3D in games cannot approach the visual fidelity and ray-traced lighting of Riven (stuff like Crysis is starting to get close, but it's still not there). In a game like Riven, where the tiniest detail is important, I don't think it having the graphics of Quake (which is pretty much the state of the art in real time 3D at the time of Riven's release) would've done it justice.

I think the Masterpiece Edition works on XP, not sure about the original. You don't want to know how I played Riven btw... Riven uses a 16 bit installer and depends on an old version of Quicktime so it's hard to get to work. By installing in a VM and copying the files to the host OS (I'm using a 64 bit OS so I couldn't run the installer) it did work, but froze every 5 minutes or so which wasn't very helpful.

I ended up installing Windows 98 in a VM and installing Riven there, and playing it that way. Of course I tried installing it in XP in a VM too but that gave me lots of sound distortion during the videos, only Win98 worked right.

EDIT: Part 7 is now available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8dtMBVfH-4. 

Riven is already 5 CDs big; including videos to show you transitioning from place to place would have made it even bigger! Myst IV contains a couple of these videos, and a lot more animations in general, and it came on 2 DVDs! Myst IV is the absolute pinnacle of what you can do with pre-rendered graphics though, even including depth-of-field effects, and using 3D acceleration for smoke, small animals, water, trees waving in the wind, etc.; it was also the last Myst game to use pre-rendered graphics. Still the designs of Myst IV aren't as good as those seen in Riven.

I don't think Riven is all that disorienting; the images are close enough together and there's enough recognisable landmarks so you can always see where you've been and where you've going.

What I find disorienting is the 360 degree views used by Myst III and IV. It's so hard to see where you can actually go, and even if a click worked you sometimes can't tell where you've ended up going, and what direction you're facing now. Combine that with the fact that both Myst III and IV had jungle environments (not like the garden seen later in Riven, but real jungles) in which it was very hard to see where you were, and it always made me get lost.

Riven unfortunately doesn't have a lot of opportunity to insert humorous quotes like that (a better comedian than me might be able to do better, though  ), so I really couldn't pass that one up.

I'm glad some people like my videos; I enjoyed making them anyway, but it's always nice to know someone is actually watching the damn things.

You, sir, have too much time on your hands (says the guy who made a Let's Play ).

I bought it, it's pretty fun. My only real complaint so far is the controls. You control Guybrush either by holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse in the direction you want to go, or using the arrow keys. It's not that bad, but it's stupid! What's wrong with point and click? It's obviously a case of the PC getting the short end of the stick for the sake of a console port.

Other that that, the game is pretty funny, the animation and voice acting is great as in all Telltale games (although it is occasionally distracting that some of the minor characters use voice actors from Sam & Max), and it's appropriately piraty (whatever that means ). The puzzles are reasonably inventive and not too difficult (but Riven is my yardstick for puzzle difficulty; everything is easy in comparison ). Sam & Max is a bit funnier in my opinion, but I just really like Sam and Max as characters.

In any case, Telltale once again provides a great adventure experience with a genuine Monkey Island feel to it, so it's definitely worth the money from my point of view.

It is finished!

I have just uploaded the final video of my Let's Play Riven series. In total there are 32 videos; 30 for the game itself, and 2 "bonus" videos showing the bad endings.

Please enjoy them, if you like.

All the videos can be found in this playlist.