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Although, since the PS2 doesn't come with a hard drive (unless you buy the Linux kit), I'm not sure how you'll experience the persistent, changing and evolving worlds they're touting.

Duh, Myst 3: Exile has been out for ages.

As far as a GAME review is concerned, I'm finding Exile to be as beautiful and riviting (if not more) than the previous two Mysts. The puzzles are challenging, the video effects are gorgeous, and the plot meets Myst expectations.

It's unfortunate that Ubi Soft didn't wait a month or two the fix the install bugs, but I would encourage anyone dedicated to playing Myst III to first visit the well-updated web site FAQ, and buy the game pre-warned. (Hey, I notice it went down in price too!)

As someone who long ago played both Scott Adams and Infocom adventures (yes I'm THAT old), there's something to be said for both reasons for puzzle-style adventure gaming dropping off.

(Note: NOT Dying, just pining for the fjords. Go to the Interactive Fiction archives and see that a great many tools have been developed for people to write their own adventure games, and many have. It's almost open-sourcey, in fact...)

By the way, who remembers the Scott Adams adventures? What a parser those things had! Could only accept one or two whole words at a time, and any sort of mistype would befuddle the poor stupid little thing.

Infocom's parser started out good and evolved over time to be phenomenal. Under Infocom's z-machine parser, I was always tempted to write an adventure in which the player would have to 'light the light light blue light' and I have faith that the parser could have handled it, damnit!

But enough of me geezing...

On the one hand, Gamespot is right that the FPS had more sparkle, more action, more color and flash. Even the original Quake, half of whose color table was shades of 'mud,' had more pop than even the fanciest *text* adventure.

Much the same way it's advertising's job to be seen, so it is with games. They need bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies to draw players from their competitors' bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies. The text adventure, never equipped to deliver that kind of flash-bang, fell by the wayside or got replaced with the graphic versions.

(And as long as I'm going to geeze, I might as well toss in that the violence isn't the problem: it's that the videogaming industry is trying to play to an audience so infovoracious, so dependent on that flash-bang, that they could be diagnosed as attention-defecit. To further back up my point, trust me on this one: I've seen preschoolers sit down at a computer and start machine-gunning the mouse on whatever program is running, just to get the computer to do things quickly. They're not learning how to use the computer because they don't have the patience to learn. They just want to get on to the next image as quickly as possible. And come to that, the teacher in that classroom didn't have the patience to learn it either...)

On the other hand, Old Man Murray has a point too: some of the games started getting too fancy-shmancy for their own good. Some of the later adventure games, in an attempt to be more clever, completely lost their credibility.

It doesn't help that I hold Sierra, the company that put out Gabriel Knight (among others) in low esteem. It wouldn't surprise me if that disguise puzzle quoted in Murray's article was something concocted by middle management.

Games like Myst and Riven helped carve the puzzle game a new niche from the text adventure... and it helped that Myst and Riven had their own internal logic. They took thought rather than jump through hoops. And as for the genre being dead, note that Myst 3: Exile is in development ... doesn't sound quite like a dead genre to me.

The Myst series isn't just a set of hoops or contrived events, but a journey set in a world with its own internal logic. Look around and explore enough, and everything is explained. But you need to do the exploring. And a little thinking.

You don't think of Myst and Riven much as interesting games because even though they have huge panoramas of beautiful scenery, they still lack the flash-bang. They provide their thrills to the whole cerebrum, not just the frontal lobes.

(Damnit, I've gotten all stream-of-consciousy again...)

And suddenly, I'm imagining a game using Unreal's FPS engine, backed with the Z-machine's gorgeously elegant parser (which is quite SMALL and could fit)...

Well, the only experience I have with the company making Myst 3 is with the Journeyman Project 3 demo from the Riven CDs. But I played that demo and I thought it was terrible. I'm disappointed that the Cyan guys aren't working on Myst 3 instead of this bizarre Myst rehash.

The Myst 3 web page seems to imply that they're using the same horrible interface from JP3 (360 degree view?)

I could be wrong - Presto might do a good job with this. But many people have tried to imitate Myst and failed. It's a lot harder to get right than it seems. Sure, anybody can string pretty pictures together and throw some puzzles in, but Myst and especially Riven were so much more than that...

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See here for info: http://www.cyan.com/info1.html

Basically, besides Myst Masterpiece for Mac and Myst3d, they're working on a project codenamed "Mudpie" which will be a massively multiplayer D'ni online roll playing game (aparently using a later version of the Myst3d Engine). And they've also licenced Presto Studios to make Myst III

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The following sentence is true.

BTW: Myst 3 is out, though it has been done by the guys who made the Journey Man Project ( Presto Studios ). There is a website: http://www.myst3.com/

Myst III Now this, I'm really looking forward too...hope they can keep up with Cyan's vision.