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Myst III: Exile Review
Here's what you get when you order Myst III:
- One thin cardboard box
- One plastic case containing four CDs
- One advertising flyer
No instruction manual, no installation guide, nothing to get you into the spirit of Myst, no handy journal to write down your thoughts, just a CD case rattling around inside a box that is about 10 times larger, by volume, than necessary to hold the case.
So here's my evaluation of the game itself:
- Gameplay: 0/10
- Graphics: 0/10
- Sound: 0/10
- Value: 0/10
The reason for the above ratings is that as far as I can tell, they shipped a set of drink coasters rather than a set of CDs with an actual game on them.
To be more specific, Ubisoft shipped a game with a massive number of crippling bugs. The Safedisc copy protection caused problems with dozens of models of CD-ROM drives - players' CD-ROMs weren't compatible with the purposeful errors caused by SafeDisc, and so they weren't able to play the game at all. Nor could you play the game if your CD-ROM was lettered higher than H: - after all, no one has a drive higher than H:, right? (Ubisoft has released a patch for this problem.) Nor could you play the game in hardware mode if your card doesn't support 32-bit color, even though the game box prominently proclaims support for 16-bit. Many people have also reported problems with choppy/broken video - this problem occurs on numerous different setups and even very fast machines. Most crippling of all, if you have an Intel, S3 or SiS video card or video chipset, your game won't run at all (similar problems have also been reported with several other video chipsets, such as ATI Rage cards).
On a huge number of machines, perhaps a third of all desktops and an even larger percentage of notebooks, all of which nominally support the requirements listed on the box, Myst III simply won't run.
Ubisoft has been stringing customers along about a promised patch for the video problem (no patch is planned for the fact that many of their customers can't use the game due to Safedisc - that's a "feature") - the expected date for the M3 patch (named due to the error message) has slipped four times now, the latest being another week into the future. I've given up and am returning the game. Probably the retailer will throw a fit about taking back an opened box, although, hey, isn't Safedisc supposed to prevent people copying the discs and returning the game, and since the company admits that their game won't run, there would be no point to keeping a copy of the game anyway. I'm now afraid to uninstall the game, since many people have reported the complete destruction of their Windows system upon uninstallation of Myst III. (My source for most user reports are the forums at Rivenguild.com).
Overall, Myst III is a fiasco. You won't see reviews like this one in regular gaming publications, which depend upon pre-releases of games - that review was written before Myst III was officially released, and if a gaming pub. got in the habit of writing bad reviews, the PR people won't send them advance games any more.
I don't really care. What the gaming industry needs is more reviews like the above. Someone didn't spend the time on quality assurance, and it shows. Unless the company gets negative feedback about it, the next game company won't put the time into quality control either. Returns have got to hurt the most for software companies, but they're usually insulated from returns by simply refusing to accept them. Bullshit. If the retailer we bought this from doesn't want it back, I'll see if a suit in small claims court won't change their mind, because selling a "product" that is acknowledged by the manufacturer not to work at all is fraudulent.
I wish all gaming publications would write reviews like this. I know that they encounter problems too, but somehow the problems never get mentioned in the final glowing review, where every game ever made rates between an 8.5 and 9.5 on a ten-point scale (except maybe games reviewed by Old Man Murray). Tell us about the problems, game reviewers. It'll make for better games in the long run.
Was that a writer reviewing a game, or a writer reviewing his own review of a game?
P.S. Slashdot needs more posts like the one above.
--
Breakfast served all day!
Cyan Worlds, Inc.
14617 N. Newport Hwy.
Mead, WA 99021-9378
would eventually get there. A letter c/o Warner Books (publisher of the Myst novels) would most likely work, too:
c/o Author Mail
Warner Books
1271 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Who knows, the Millers seem like pretty nice guys -- maybe they'd even put some pressure on UbiSoft to fix things.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
What the gaming industry needs is more reviews like the above.
You aren't reviewing the game, your reviewing the bad status of the game. You didn't get it to work, so its a bad game?
No, the game needs more work and patches, which sucks, but the game still could be wonderful. I will use Ultima9 as an example. When it was released, it blew and was incomplete, but after the last patch was installed, the game was outstanding.
In the end, lets not criticize the game, lets find out why it is bad and criticize that (was the publisher forcing the developer to release before it was ready? Did the developer fail to use a good QA strategy?). The developer might not be the reason the game failed, so quit trying to start a crusade before you know the enemy.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
It seems to me that the art to writing reviews is to find the good stuff to say. If the game (or movie, or book, etc.) is so bad that the good stuff you find is highly contrived then most intelligent people will take your point and not waste their money. As for the unintelligent people, well, "A fool and his money..."
For example, the original review complained that the CD's were only useful as coasters. Instead, he could have praised their good qualities.
Instead of complaining about the software protection...
Don't rag on the poor developers, give credit where credit is due.
Finally, and seriously, don't give a any product a "zero". Most readers will think you are holding a grudge and won't take you seriously. Is it worse than software that sends pr0n to your Mom, initializes your harddrive, and fries your CPU? No? It's better than a zero. Give it a "4 out of 10" and no one's going to buy it anyway (unless they have too much free time and way too much cash.)
Just my two cents... If I knew what I was talking about I'd be a highly-paid game reviewer ;)
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
A movie such as the above doesn't deserve a review, and neither does this game. Installing a video game simply should not be the ordeal that many seem to be. 'Move to another computer'??? A review is written so the consumer has an idea of what to expect, BEFORE shelling out $50. To most people, another computer is NOT an option.
Why do we accept such shoddy workmanship from software manufacturers, and when someone points this out, they get flamed: 'I wanna know the pixel depth and texture count, I don't give a damn if I have to re-install Windows 74 times first!'
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
As a writer and editor for many game industry publications, you have a point. Yes, the print games publications, and many of the sites associated with them, work on beta copy. It is the only way to remain competitive in a world starved for gaming information. As a result, we tend to ignore some of the simple install problems, or mention them in passing, simply because we are told this problem will be fixed by release, and the VAST majority of the time it is. Further, we get jaded because those of us in the industry get better tech support than the average gamer. You get on the phone and call your PR contact with the company and say you are having a problem and it is stopping you from finishing your preview for Happy Puppy or CGW...well, you can imagine that they don't send your call to the lowest man on the help desk. At the same time, there isn't a hell of a lot that you can do to avoid some of this. If we don't go to press as soon as our competition, we don't have a publication. That simple. No one wants to read a review two months after the game is on the shelves. And with print magazines, if you always waited for boxed copy, that is just what would happen. So there is a certain amount of trust involved between the game company and the reviewer. However, what does happen, if you are an ethical editor, which most are, is that you remember if a flack lied to you about a problem being fixed before release. And the next time you hear that, you make sure that you state very strongly in your copy that you had a problem with the game from a technical perspective. Provide fair warning to the potential buyer. However, your statement that you wouldn't be in business any more if you printed bad reviews simply isn't true in my experience. I panned more Take 2 games in a row than I can count, just to pick one company. If you are good sized pub or site, they can't really mark you off the list. And the idea that the game companies don't care about shipping product with this kind of problem because of the return situation is on crack. Yes, pre release publicity drives some game sales in the first few days. However, word of mouth sells a tremendous number of games. The majority. Word gets out a game doesn't work or play well, and reviews or no reviews, the company takes a bath. I understand that there are problems with the review and editorial process in gaming, no doubt, but the solutions aren't as simple as they appear to some people. And the idea that reviewers don't call a bad game because they will be "cut off" is prevailent and bogus. jpw
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
For example, I remember reviewing a while back. I don't recall the company, but it was one of those "motion-video keyboard" games, where you watched grainy motion video and pressed keyboard keys to change the video, giving some semblance of a "game". This was in the nacient era of CD-ROM's, and it was supposed to be a "fighting game", but anyone could tell the game sucked. Most games of this genre did.
So I wrote a review saying the game sucked, and gave as one of my reasons "pseudo-videogame play does not constitute real gameplay". I gave the game a zero score.
Boy did I ever get roasted. First, my editor laughed because he thought the review was funny, and he printed it. Then we got a call from the game developer, saying they would never send up a free review copy of a game again (magazines rely on this -- they rarely ever purchase games). Then they threatened to pull advertising, and tell other game companies not to advertise.
Needless to say, my editor was no longer laughing. The magazine published a "counterpoint" review by a different writer, the gaming magazine industry's way of an apology. From that point on, I knew I could never write an "honest" review of a game again, at least for any noteworthy publication.
But since this guy paid for the game, and it's only Slashdot, this is "acceptable" in this case.