First, does anyone else feel that Myst IV is a solid contender for GOTY? I certainly do. And no, I’m not kidding.
Second, does anyone know anything about this site: http://www.downloadshield.com/index1.html ? My first impression is that it’s a warez site, but the Yahoo and “AS SEEN ON TV” graphics make me wonder otherwise. On the other hand again, they DO supposedly have games that aren’t released yet (The Movies? For real?), so it must be either a warez or a “sell demos under the pretense that they’re full games” site or something like that.
That’s really not how i expected that sentence to end.
Airon Corporation. Smoke and mirrors outfit. Same setup with movies, and they’ve also gotten on the BBB’s bad side from their car auction shenanigans. Basically, pre-paid p2p with no greater guarantees than you’d have with K-Lite or eDonkey. Plus you get to run an executable of dubious value from an unscrupulous company. Win/win.
It’s hard for me to see that. I enjoyed it and gave it 4/5 stars, mostly because I thought the story was great, it was a beautiful game from an artistic standpoint, and a lot of the puzzles were fun. If you’re a Myst fan, you HAVE to play this just to see what happens to the characters. But enough of the game fell victim to frustrating “game logic” to keep me from considering it any sort of serious GOTY contender – you’re just kept in the dark too much and it’s too easy to miss tiny clues that bring the game to a screeching halt.
Ok, I’m unfamiliar with K-Lite and eDonkey. I don’t do the p2p thing, even for music, but my understanding is that you don’t pay for the stuff you’re downloading, since you’re just downloading it from some other user’s machine. So what is a “prepaid p2p?” Do you just mean that the user is paying for the p2p software and, hence, the privilege of having access to their network?
Here’s the big question in my mind: if these guys are abetting piracy, how are they getting away with it? I mean, it’s not like they’re pretending to offer a legitimate service or anything. It’s a pretty straightforward pitch: subscribe to our service and go download Molyneux’s “The Movies” or any of a host of new or not-yet-released items in their entirety. It seems like that, along with the Yahoo and Froogle “endorsements” on their frontpage, would be enough to get them sued and/or prosecuted posthaste.
Caveat: I haven’t finished the game yet. I may have jumped the gun. On the other hand, if you’re a fan of the slow and tedious like I am (and you’ve already said you’re not), then “more of the same” can’t be all bad, if that’s what the rest of the game is.
I think it’s pretty clear that even a perfect, flawless adventure game (if there were such a thing) would fail to get a GOTY nod from today’s gamers, who think that the criteria for good action and head-to-head competitive games are the appropriate criteria for games in general. Rome: Total War and Painkiller will no doubt get the nod over Myst IV from most “mainstream” sources this year, not because of any actual superiority they possess, but because the judges will shrug off their flaws while exaggerating their strengths (while doing the reverse to Myst), and that simply because they like action/strategy/wargames more than they like adventure games. I never said Myst IV is a perfect game. All I said was that it deserved to be considered a contender for GOTY. If you think it gets so boring and tedious later on that it doesn’t even deserve to be in the ring anymore, then it must get pretty tedious indeed, because the rest of the presentation is sterling. I’m an immersion guy, and Myst IV is one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played–maybe THE most immersive, especially after a couple of…drinks.
I enjoyed your review, by the way. I’m not so much arguing with you here as with the world, which harbors an unjust prejudice toward adventure games. Your opinion seems balanced and fair, so I got no beef witchu.
