We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I did actually enjoy Exile (the third game in the Myst series) quite a bit - it and Riven are my two favorites. Revelations is excellent when it comes to visual quality, but...Serenia.

[hissing intensifies]

(The less said about the fifth game, the better. They...tried.)

I actually got ahold of a copy of Myst Online: Uru Live a little while back. The community is extremely tiny, which makes for a very interesting experience - you can go for hours without seeing a single person, then all of a sudden you'll pass each another person in the corridor without being able to think of anything to say. It clearly wasn't intended to be played like that, but I think it works out better than it would if everything was crowded.

The controls are, regrettably, garbage, and some puzzles need multiple people to clear - which is defendable because it's a multiplayer game, but annoying because of the sheer lack of people. I ended up having to run a second copy and double team some levels with myself.

Some of the puzzles are a lot harder and lengthier, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest. One of them requires you to cook chemicals (which takes about six hours) and then drop them down a hole, while another player sits at the bottom and relays the results to you. Brilliant in concept, frustrating on the player's end in execution.

Putting aside some of the ones that are difficult purely because of the multiplayer aspect, there are a lot of absolutely brilliant puzzles in there. It's difficult to give examples without giving away the solutions, but one of the puzzles requires you, as the player, to adjust what you see as the boundaries of the world not once, but multiple times. The sense of satisfaction from figuring them out is immense.