Myst

Myst has got to be one of the most sought-after games on the Amiga for a long time. Despite being a relatively young company, ClickBoom have managed to pull off two coups quite recently and converted both Myst and Quake for the Amiga. Hats off to them for their continued support and in producing a steady stream of quality software. Although I don't really like to speculate about the past, I do wonder what the Amiga games scene would have been like today if there were more companies like ClickBOOM producing software like this, and of course listening to the opinions of the community. It has to be said that I don't really play games much (especially not single player ones like this). In fact, I haven't really sat down and played an adventure game since "Terrormolinos" and "The Hobbit" on the Spectrum!

Before you can even start playing Myst, you'll need an appropriately-equipped machine. This isn't nearly as ominous as it sounds. You need only eight megabytes of fast RAM and about five megabytes of hard drive space for a modest installation (and a CD-ROM drive, of course). This sort of spec isn't exactly out of reach for your average Amigan. You can run the game using either CyberGraphX/Picasso 96 or AGA and AHI is used for sound output. Actually, I tried the game on both a HiRes Interlaced (640x512) screen on AGA in 256 colours, and 24-bit on a 640x480 display using a Picasso II and a 17" Monitor. Believe it or not, I found the AGA version seemed to react a bit faster, and the image was slightly sharper. Who said AGA was bad ? You actually lose very little image quality when you use AGA rather than a graphics card with a true or high colour mode. The dithering is noticeable in some places, but generally it's great. Installation gives you several levels of what you can install to your hard drive and what to read directly off the CD. You can install anything from five megabytes onto your hard drive to the whole lot (310 megabytes). I don't think I'm a dedicated enough gamer to commit that much space to a game, so I stuck with the smaller install. I don't think that it really inhibited the quality of the game, either.

The object of the game is to collect a series of pages for either a red or blue book. In each of the two books, one of two brothers has been imprisoned inside. When you collect enough pages, you'll be able to free one of them. Sounds simple, doesn't it ? Don't be fooled! Once I tried playing it, it was pretty clear that it was going to take some time to reach the end. In fact, let me start by saying that this game is deep. It's so deep, that I'll probably never finish it! The first thing you'll notice is that everything is built from gorgeous raytraced graphics. It's all extremely lifelike. The attention to detail as you can see from the screenshots is beyond stunning. First of all, I went around exploring the place, but not really paying too much attention to all the intricate details. It seemed fair enough, and at first there didn't seem to be many locations. How wrong I was. On subsequent occasions, I thought I'd try to solve some of the puzzles. I didn't seem to get very far, and I began to think that pretty soon I'd end up getting miffed and then not coming back for a while. Wrong again. I was considering the possibility of at least glancing at the solution in the magazine, but I wanted to do it by myself, so I have never looked at it. I'm pretty glad I didn't because I tried experimenting with some switches and buttons and then somehow things started reacting. Through this, I then managed to reach another set of locations. I did say the graphics were gorgeous, didn't I ?

Myst is built around the concept of experimentation. You try something, you get stuck, you go away for a bit, and then you come back and it all makes sense. It's a really satisfying feeling when something finally clicks and you understand one of the puzzles. It's all surprisingly logical, and when you do find out what you've been going round in circles looking for, you'll kick yourself!

It should be noted that although I have heard claims (although not from ClickBOOM themselves, of course) that Myst is completely 24-bit, this isn't strictly true. I have yet to find any 24-bit stills in the game (and the "Making of Myst" animation included on the CD does make references to the fact that they wanted to keep the size of the images down). It's not really too much of a problem, because the images look great in the 8-bit resolution that they are in. The good news is that AGA users get as good a game from it as people with graphics cards. Some of the QuickTime animations seem to be 24-bit as I have noticed a difference when running the game in 8-bit mode.

There are a few annoying little quirks in the game. One of them is that you can only hold one page at a time. This means that you have to go to each world and back twice if you want to pick up both pages... that is, if you're supposed to pick up both... The other is that when you save a game, it only seems to save the game at certain milestone points... but it doesn't make any mention of this in the manual or the game -you simply have to see if the game is still there when you load it back next time you play. I have to say that the QuickTime engine it uses is pretty crap. The fact that most of it is coming off the CD ought to be irrelevant as most of the movies themselves are quite small and could fit in RAM quite nicely. CyberQT does a much better job of displaying the animations on the CD, and so does MoviePlayer on an emulated Mac under Fusion.

I think the best way to sum up this review is "buy it". I'd have no doubts in highly recommending this game. Seldom have I come across a game as enchanting as Myst. If I tell you any more, I'll be giving too much away!