La Dee Dah...

Another few days without being able to run or do anything significant, another boring post. Luckily I'm just about there and should be able to get off my ass just in time to fly home and do some fun things. Just quite irritating to be at least a week out of shape and have to get back into it. Rule #1, don't get injured. Rule #2, I have about a million rules and I label them all as Rule #1.

So I decided to go ahead and finish up the Myst series with Exile. Having completed it, I'd really like to say it's my favorite of the bunch. Unfortunately that's probably biased, because it's the most recent. I remember thinking the original Myst and Riven especially were incredibly awesome when they first came out. This one works out to about ten hours. And yes, I caved. I think it was twice I used the devil that is the walkthrough, and in both cases I'd spent about an hour wandering around trying to figure it out. The great thing about this game when compared with Riven is that solutions to problems are very near the problems themselves. When you flip a switch or whatnot you can generally tell what it did, without having to go wandering all over the map to various places you were stuck on seeing if whatever you did helped any of those problems. For those who like logic in general, I really have to plug Amateria. Quick synopsis before I get to that, you start off in one age, and can link to any of three ages at that point, in random order. The ages don't connect, and you don't need information from one of the three to do another of the three or anything like that. So if you get bored and stuck on one you can do another, but will eventually have to go back and puzzle through the one you're stuck on. Only once you've completed all three do you link to the final age and "piece it all together" as they say. I was unaware of this concept, so the two times I used the walkthrough were because I figured the answer must be in some other age and I'd missed it. Of course it wasn't, but I didn't really get that DUH feeling, because the answers were difficult as expected. Anyway back to Amateria, everything in this age is logic based, and at the end it all comes together in an amazing sequence that makes puzzling through the different aspects all totally worth it. Reminds me of my days with contraptions in the backyard, but you'd have to see old home videos to understand that. Voltaic also has a pretty sweet visual ending, so as a whole the results of your troubles are quite gratifying. The acting by the bad guy is quite good, and there are about a dozen possible endings, one of which has him rush you with some sort of hammer and knock you dead, which had me backing away from the screen in a hurry. Overall the puzzles are not as difficult as Riven, mainly because like I said they are solvable just based on what's in the general area for the most part. That's not to say they're easy, some do take a while, but they don't require copius notes throughout the game or anything.

Upon finishing I was quite sad the series was over, but then when watching the "Making Of" movies that came with the games (which you shouldn't watch until afterwards if you don't want spoilers) I saw that a new game called Uru, Ages Beyond Myst had just come out. So maybe there's some future play after all. I should mention Exile was the first game in the series to let you look 360 degrees in any direction at every turn, rather than just at a snapshot facing forward. This added to the photorealism as if you were really there, and created some cool effects. In Uru you actually can wandering around like your typical action game, from a third person or first person perspective, so it should be interesting to see how that changes things.

K done with computer game talk. In other news I leave at 6am on Christmas morning to go home, which means like a 4am arrival or something ridiculous to the airport. Probably going to extended park for two dollars a day at this place I got referred to at the airport to save the fifty bucks or something a round trip taxi would cost. Should be interesting to see what kinds of people are flying on Christmas morning. Plans call for family stuff that day, then a snowboarding trip on either the 29th or 30th depending on weather if it makes a difference, then the usual Disneyland extravaganza the 31st, then leaving again around 3pm out of LAX on the 1st and showing up back here late. Somewhere in between on the 26th-28th or 29th and so forth I'll be trying to fit in various excursions with people I won't be seeing again for quite a while, so feel free to call the cell if interested.