Chinese GL

Myst is one of my favourite games of all time! I played it back in the 90s, & it remains awesome. Nice to see it coming to PlayStation finally (the shitty port of the og version does not count), & this remake looks stunning. But what I'm most excited about is Riven, because for nearly 30 bloody years I have been constantly cockblocked from playing this game. Seriously.

I missed it when it first came out, & couldn't find it in any local game shops when I tried looking (I have a distinct memory of asking some guy working in one if they had it in stock & him sneering, "That's an old game!" when it was just a few years old wtf).

Then in the late 2000s I got a boxed set of all 5 games. And Riven was incompatible with Windows 7. Ironically, Myst ran fine, despite technically being an older game, as they used the Masterpiece Edition, which was newer. Games 3-5, which were more modern, ran fine (though I never finished 3, & 4 & 5 were shit). Annoyingly, I did some investigating, & apparently there were two versions of Riven. One was *slightly* updated & was supposedly compatible with Windows XP, & likely would run fine on Windows 7, & one wouldn't work on anything beyond Windows 98. Guess which one they included?

A few years pass, & we're in the early 2010s now, & the Myst games come to GOG, including Riven, & the listing claimed it to be compatible with modern hardware. Well that was a fucking lie. I tried it on my PC running Windows 7. I tried it on a virtual machine running Windows XP. I think I even tried it on my laptop running Windows 8, because why the hell not. Compatibility issues a-go-go. Even in XP I barely made it a few minutes between crashes.

A decade passes, & news comes of a remake. But it's for the PC. And while I technically have a PC, it's a Surface Go 2, which isn't exactly a gaming powerhouse.

However, not long after, I learned that Myst (specifically the realMyst version with upgraded graphics) & Riven were available on Android. I could play Myst on my phone! Truly, the future. However, the downside was that this meant trying to play these games, which relied on small details, on a small screen. That was fine with Myst, as I've played it enough over the years that I know what I'm doing. But with Riven, I'm left squinting at an unfamiliar game on a screen smaller than the game ever expected you to be playing it on. I did give a brief try at connecting my phone to my PC & playing the game on that, via my phone. But phone to PC connection was in early days at that point, & the 'app screen' was still pretty small. I meant to make some effort at trying again at some point, possibly using Samsung DeX, which would require purchasing a special dock, though might be worth it. But I never quite got around to it.

But soon, my waiting might actually end! Possibly. No point counting chickens yet, considering how a lot of game releases go these days, & how bad the original PlayStation ports were.

Definitely sad I no longer have my PSVR2. That would be an awesome way to play these games!

Apparently it's based on a book (according to a friend who read it in the original German years ago). It looks like the first & second books in the series are available in English, so I'll have to give them a go. There's a third, but it just came out in German a few weeks ago, so I guess I'll have to wait for the translation.

Probably should feel bad for the lamb & mint pasty I had to eat afterwards though oops