In-Game Chat

Plenty of you are likely familiar with the regard in which I hold certain games and developers. There’s Criterion with the Burnout series and, of course, Naughty Dog and Uncharted. There’s a few others in there, but not many. The list grows very slowly if at all.

However, the first studio and games that I ever fell in love with started on the PC and they started with adventure/puzzle games. I vividly remember playing The 7th Guest on my father’s 486DX40…I think. I don’t even know if that’s how you write it out anymore and no clue on ANYTHING about the specs it had, but Dad said it was good and it ran the game, so I was happy.

While Trilobyte made me take notice of what kind of a world I could find on a PC and the puzzles waiting for me, it was another company that would fuel the obsession and forever remain my standard for adventure/puzzle gaming.

I’m not exactly sure what first drew me to pick up Myst from Cyan Worlds. I wasn’t following gaming news. About the closest thing I had was Nintendo Power at the time. It had to have been the box that made me buy it….or ask for it. Again, the details of how I came to own the game are fuzzy. I can only think that I walked into Electronics Boutique in the mall with my mother or father and looked at the PC section, noticed the box, the little banner on it claiming “WINNER OF 12 MAJOR AWARDS including 1994 GOLD MEDAL & 1994 WORLD-CLASS AWARD” and then either asked my Dad if his computer could play it or remembered what he’d told me enough to know it would and bought it.

However way I came to own Myst didn’t matter, once I played it I was hooked. I can’t remember how long it took me to finish the game, but I had notes upon notes during my journey through Myst island and the different ages. It was the hardest game I’d ever played at the time and for some time to come following. In fact, I likely didn’t get another challenge like that until the sequel, Riven, was released. I have that box, too, by the way. In fact, I have every boxed copy of a Myst game I have ever bought – double dips and all. I own the soundtracks lacking only Myst IV and Myst V. In fact, here’s pretty much everything of Myst that I own in some kind of physical form at the moment:

Soundtracks, digital copies, and eBooks aren’t shown, but I have those too

The bug had bitten me and I forever tried to reach back to that first feeling of visiting Myst island. Although, it only actually seemed to work when I played a Myst game. A few titles here and there came close. Syberia was one of those games, but as I played it, the game became its own thing and not something I ended up comparing to what Myst was for me. Myst has stayed with me since I played the very first game nearly 20 years ago. And I had long since given up on seeing anything new in the universe. Myst V: End Of Ages was the finale, and I had my doubts early on in the release of that game that we wouldn’t see a Myst VI or some kind of side venture, but the more I read about End Of Ages, the more I began to accept that the adventure was over.

Then, just a week ago (the day before my birthday, in fact), a project on Kickstarter sprung up from Cyan Worlds called Obduction. The first thing I did was look at the backer rewards for the boxed copy of the game (it’s at the $75 level). Done. Backed. Now, where’s the level that gets my name in the credits? Could they possibly have a level that gets me to provide input for the development of the game or maybe a visit to the studio? They have all of those and more and while some of the levels are out of my reach, I’m still getting a boxed copy of their game whenever it’s released. That’s, of course, assuming their project gets funded, but I really have no doubt in my mind it won’t pass its goal and become a reality.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a game from Cyan to look forward to, and it doesn’t really matter that it isn’t part of the Myst….mythos. It’s a new beginning from them. And maybe it doesn’t take a Myst game to bring me back to that first feeling of being on Myst island, maybe all it takes is Cyan to keep doing what they do best. That’s a project I’ll support every time they offer it. As was said to me 20 years ago in Myst by one of the founders of Cyan…perhaps the ending has not yet been written.

Seven years and we’ve barely ever used this space for anything other than an official place to put our shows. We gave it some thought and figured we should change that and give writing a shot and put our voices to…screen, as it were in between the times we do those shows.

I can’t guarantee we’ll do this as scheduled every day of every week (except Saturdays & Sundays). But we’ll try.

This past weekend both Batman games were on sale on Steam, in what I can only guess was a celebratory manner for having both titles stripped of the GFWL brand and soothed over with the cooling aloe of Steamworks. Not only that, but those who’d previously bought the two games on Steam had their copies upgraded (both of them) to the “Game Of The Year” editions with all the extra content added in.

All this did was remind me that since the time I’d bought these games on my PC, I’d recently rebuilt my machine and made the switch from an AMD graphics card to NVIDIA – almost for the singular reason of PhysX. I’d been with an AMD card for quite a few previous builds of my machine and had watched, almost with heartbreak for me, the videos of games come and go that were using the PhysX stuff in NVIDIA cards. Finally, I could play a game I have a distinct recollection of watching back when I didn’t have the proper equipment to see all of its bells and whistles with PhysX – Batman: Arkham City.

So far it’s been fun. The game that is. I’ve barely noticed the really great ways fog moves, curtains flow, and papers fly around when you walk over them. I mean, sure, they’re there and I’ll take notice occasionally, but for the most part, I’m just too focused on being Batman to really pay attention. Then again, I’m not very far into the game so maybe there’s more of it later on I’ll actually start to see. Still, it’s a bit comforting to know that whenever NVIDIA does release videos of upcoming games using their tech of physics, I’ll know I can play that game and see exactly what they are showing me.

That said, they’ve really been showing off what their cards and tech can do in the next Batman game releasing on Friday – Arkham Origins. The game hasn’t really snuck up on me, but my anticipation for it has. Just a week or so ago I knew it was coming out, but I was very…meh on the issue. Not disappointed or thinking it wasn’t going to live up to the previous games, but just, well…neither here nor there on it. However, since replaying Arkham City over the weekend I’ve gotten more and more excited for Origin’s release. I’ve been reading forums and subreddits, watching videos (even the most recent walkthrough done by someone who got their hands on an early copy), and I’m even listening to the soundtrack sample as I write this*. It’s rare I get this enthusiastic for the release of a game to drown myself in its media and hype, but here I am…wallowing in it, soaking it all up.

I’m not even really worried about the reviews. I’ve only played a bit of the game at PAX and it really plays EXACTLY like Arkham City. Yeah sure, it isn’t Rocksteady making the game, but the guys at WB Montreal seemed to have done a fantastic job mimicking their every move. I find that to be good and bad, in a way. This is good because it means they don’t stray too far from a formula that works and bad in the sense that they aren’t really carving a place for themselves. I mean, the sections of Gotham that were in Arkham City look very familiar, as they should, and it means the team had more time to work on other aspects of the game. Having it set yet again in the winter means most of the areas affected by the weather could go unchanged (that pool on the highrise is still frozen over). Setting it on Christmas Eve and added the element of a terrible blizzard and that keeps them from making Gotham as busy as a city like it would be on the streets – keep in the tone of a locked away prison playground as it was used in the game before. And maybe they don’t have to stand out for themselves. Maybe coming away with a win on a Batman game means they’ve shown they can make things work and build the confidence to work on their own stuff and not be held to a standard of another studio. Maybe. We’ll see when the game releases on Friday.

In fact, I think I’m going to finish this up and get back into Arkham City for a bit. Getting all the DLC in the recent PC upgrade from Steam means I have new content to explore. Speaking of which, I think I’ll stream my playthrough of the “Harley’s Revenge” DLC.

*Check out 10:14, 14:00, & 17:51 for my favorites so far