Myst Masterpiece Edition

This is a puzzle game, very simply. You walk from one puzzle to another, and solve all of them until you win the game. If you like hard-core puzzle games, this may well be for you. If you prefer your puzzles with more in the way of logical progression and purpose, or even a story-- an adventure game, say --this is simply not an adventure game. Anyone expecting an adventure is likely to come away sore disappointed. By all means, do buy it for the puzzles and the oddly compelling atmosphere. On a note completely unrelated to the gameplay, the original graphics (640x480) have not aged well, and while Masterpiece Edition is an arguably clever solution-- all the original models have been exported to meshes for your 3D accelerator to render in realtime --this somewhat reduces the final quality. Also, the game operates only in a few, fixed resolutions. This will not take full advantage of your 1280x1024-or-better display. Also, you are probably going to want to find some way to force your video card drivers to produce 4xAA-or-better output, if that's possible. That would significantly sharpen up the graphics, and reduce the jaggies. Radeon owners, if they have cards or drivers that still support ATi's interpolate-more-vertices option (whatever it was called), may also get better results if they can force this option on.

I was hoping for full screen graphics, but this version runs in a graphics box enviroment and resolution is low. Game works well but lacks the visuals it might have had

The images are so bad that I am unable to play the MYST game.

In 1993, Myst was a compelling mystery game. It reached a wide audience and sold well, and was one of the easiest titles to find for Windows95 on store shelves. The game itself had (for the time) beautiful prerendered images and what seemed like futuristic animations. But once realtime 3D rendering caught on (beyond clever hacks like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Duke3D which still relied on sprites)... Myst was no longer a big deal. Its static screens, cheesy/slow transitions, and clickable inset animation blocks started to seem lifeless. The story is sparse; you're alone on a series of small islands and must assemble clues in the right order to figure out the mystery. Most of the puzzles are interesting, but at least one will make you get a pencil and paper and another was (for me as a teenager) a total stumper that unfortunately made me turn to the internet for a solution. Unfortunately there's almost zero replay value, because if you know the solution to a few key puzzles, you can go from beginning to end in about 5 minutes. But if you're interested in this enigmatic universe, Myst is good to play as a lead-up to its far bigger and more varied sequel, Riven. Can't decide? Flip through the screenshots -- except for the animations, it's almost the same thing as playing. If that's not enough action for you, then you won't like Myst.

too much time trying to figure out benign clues and no way to store them. Have to revisit a lot. Can't get past the first page. Maybe when I have days on end to work it I will try again. Just no excitement there.