Myst!


18 Jan 1995 17:45:21 GMT

I know I'm probably a little behind the times, but I just played Myst
for the first time. I think they did an amazing job; you feel like
you're inside a movie adaptation of a classic adventure game.
(Unfortunately, just like most movie adaptations, it compromises
somewhat on the original work; the puzzles are pretty simple. I bought
the thing on Monday, and managed to finish it Tuesday.)

Up to now, I've usually turned my nose up at attempts to go multi-media
with interactive fiction, but this thing is changing my mind. It uses
background music and short bits by actors to great effect, along with
the well-designed rendered graphics.

So, here's a question for you: how would one go about attempting to
integrate sound, pictures or video to a "normal" adventure game?
Languages like TADS and Inform wouldn't seem to have any support for
this sort of thing. But if I used a general-purpose language, I'd
have to hack my own parser together, and lose portability as well.

The crew working on Myst apparently had to make several sacrifices.
The player has a very limited set of possible actions, basically
point and click (no parser here). Except for buttons and levers, no
ability to manipulate objects. Almost no ability to carry anything. I
kept thinking that if they had just spent a little more effort on
integrating the player into the game, rather than just integrating the
special effects, it could have been even better.

So, the dream here is to see a good, complex IF game with a front-end
like Myst. ;) Any ideas?

John