Product Details
 | Myst IV: Revelation (DVD-ROM) |
| Price: | $43.98 |
Availability: Usually ships in 4-5 business days
Ships from and sold by Hitgaming Video Games
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Average customer review:
Product Description
Myst IV: Revelation will challenge you to unravel an intricate mystery, in a world where plants and machinery have combined. Make your way through a labryinthine plot as you save the D'Ni people. Travel through environments that pulse with life, as you unearth a treacherous scheme involving two of Myst's most sinister villains.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #3320 in Video Games
- Brand: UBI Soft
- Released on: 2004-09-28
- ESRB Rating: Teen
- Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Mac OS X
- Format: DVD-ROM
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.25" h x 5.50" w x 7.75" l,
Features
- Puzzle-solving adventure game
- Optional multi-layered help system is available when stuck with puzzles
- Track your clues by taking pictures of evidence and writing notes in an in-game journal
- Original music created by Peter Gabriel and Jack Wall
- For 1 player
Editorial Reviews
From
the Manufacturer
Journey into a world of mystery and beauty
as you piece together the secrets of a shattered past. In Myst IV
Revelation, the next chapter in the greatest adventure saga of all
time, you'll travel through environments pulsing with life to unearth a
treacherous scheme involving two of Myst's most sinister villains.
- Unravel an intricate mystery... Solve elusive puzzles and enlist the help of others as you uncover secrets left buried since the original Myst.
- Adventure through rich and vital worlds... Myst's astonishing new visuals will enthrall you with opulent landscapes brimming with life, while tense, live-action cut scenes draw you deeper into the labyrinthine plot.
- Original music by Peter Gabriel... Drift away on an ambient soundtrack composed by world-renowned artist Peter Gabriel, in collaboration with Jack Wall.
- Record your discoveries... Capture clues by taking original photographs of Myst's lush environments, and keep track of your explorations in your in-game journal.
- Bring along a guide... Take advantage of the optional multilayered help system, including illuminating flashbacks and an intuitive Zip mode that transports you from place to place.
Customer Reviews
Massive requirements but amazing puzzle gameplay
The latest Myst game is out.
With Myst IV Revelation, you have TWO DVDs full of gaming information.
This takes up 8 GIG on your hard drive for a full install. It is
massive.
Yes, as you can imagine, the graphics are gorgeous.
Birds fly over to the birdfeeder as you watch, and then flit off. The
water ripples beneath you. The clouds drift by. The art nouveau
architecture is simply gorgeous, and each world has its own culture. It
is a visual feast.
The sounds are equally immersive. Peter
Gabriel did some of the sound. The audio track not only draws you into
the world, but also gives you clues, if you listen carefully to what
sounds you are hearing in which locations.
But how is the
*gameplay*? I am a huge, huge fan of the Myst series so I have to say,
if you're patient, the game is really fun. But you can't expect to just
zip through the game quickly. The point is to sit with a glass of wine,
roaming around, clicking on things, exploring your world. There is a lot
of trial and error before you discover what the next puzzle is - and
then a lot of twiddling before you get the hang of it.
Unfortunately,
the very first puzzle, of lining up audio wave signals, is REALLY
annoying. The helper is trying to give you assistance but most of the
time his comments strike you as quite intrusive. It's not a puzzle at
all that will "make sense" to most people. I am actually an audio buff
and my boyfriend is a musician who plays with audio files, and even so
we found the controls and setup hard to work with. This would have been
find as an end-game puzzle, but it is awful as the way to get people
into the game in the first place. The other subsequent puzzles are much
more enjoyable and logical.
I wanted to pick up all sorts of
things, and got frustrated that I could see books and not read them. You
could never tell which pieces of paper were readable and which were
mysteriously glued to the table. The amulet that you pick up is fun,
giving you visions and sounds to help you move the plot along. However
it blinks pretty much ANY time you zoom in on things. Why not just have
it show you the video automatically the first time, and let you click on
it after that to replay the video? The constant click - zoom - click -
amulet got a bit much. Especially when the video was on the meaningless
side.
I really would have hoped that by now the game would be
"fully motion" enabled. In the first myst, you in essence walked through
paintings. You could only look at the screen and then click to go
somewhere else. You couldn't turn and rotate. Through Myst II-IV we got
more and more video, first as tiny integrations and then as full
screens. But while we can "look around us" in Myst IV, you still have to
click and wait to move your feet. Maybe Myst V will actually let you
walk. It's that clicking that begins to wear on me, the click, wait,
click, wait. The quick-hop ability to leap to certain spots does help,
but I would rather be able to move seamlessly through my world.
That
all being said, Myst IV is definitely a must-have for any puzzle lover.
The graphics and sounds are gorgeous, and the puzzles are challenging
and fun. I do have a walkthrough online but please do NOT use
walkthroughs until you are really stuck. The point of this game is not
to race through and be done. The point is to enjoy the world, to immerse
yourself and to try, try, try and finally succed at the puzzle in front
of you.
Warning Defective By Design -
Won't play on thousands of PCs
I so wanted to play this
latest installment in the Myst series that I purchased the game even
before it was released. I had heard it had demanding system requirements
but I thought, hey, I've got a brand new P4 2.2GHz machine, wonderful
Radeon 9800 video card and 1Gig of RAM. That the game shipped only on
DVD seemed ideal: I have two DVD players, both top o' the line.
Imagine
my surprise and disappointment when, after installing the game, Myst IV
refused to recognize either of my DVD drives. I uninstalled,
reinstalled, and still, no play. I'm getting frustrated and go out on
the 'net and look at the support forums. I learn thousands of people
were getting the same error. The only solution that seemed to apply to
me? Ubi Support suggests I go out and buy "a cheap DVD player." There is
no other solution provided (they have stock answers if you happen to
run virtual drive software or have last year's graphic card, but for
people like me, our curse is to have top-grade hardware).
Turns
out, Ubi programmed the notoriously lame and always disruptive
MacroVision anti-piracy software into the game. This anti-piracy
software is famous for screwing up any program where the developers were
dumb and lazy enough to use it. Ubi Support indicated that they knew
full well that MacroVision would make Myst IV unplayable for a huge
percentage of us who were foolish enough to purchase the game, who
didn't have "cheap DVD players." In other words, Ubi designed Myst IV to
be defective.
If the slide show you get to see while you are
installing is any indication, then the thousands of us who wasted $40 on
this drink-coaster-ware are really missing out on something good.
So,
caveat emptor, fellow gamers. Try a friend's copy before forking out
the clams for a game that likely won't run on your machine. Just ask the
Ubi developers. They designed it that way.
By the way, bad copy
protection software only keeps honest people out of the game. I wonder
if lost sales due to defective design and bad press will be more
significant than lost sales due to piracy...
"Myst" the perfect mark - but only by a little bit.
For some reason, I love this
game. It's a little odd, because while I was playing it I kept thinking
"Why'd they do it like that? It should have been done this way". But
there's no doubt that if you want your good old-fashinoned Myst
weirdness -beautiful, interactive worlds with more cool gizmos than you
can shake Jules Verne at - Revelation delivers in spades.
But first, a
few warnings.
As you might expect, it being on DVD and everything,
the amount of memory this game takes is HUGE. 3 gigs is a MINIMUM PC
install. Full install is 8. Minimum gives you ridiculous
screen-transition times, often over 3 seconds. This is a long time for
gamers, and sometimes I'd look up a puzzle solution just to make sure I
was on the right track so I wouldn't have to endure running back and
forth to check a machine or find a symbol.
Second, you need a pretty
good, new graphics card. The graphics are still pretty nice - okay,
gorgeous - without a top-of-the-line card, but having some more depth
perception would have been nice.
Thirdly, I found the acting quite
disappointing. Everything sounds scripted. Longtime fans might remember a
gibbering, drooling Achenar. The new one looks and sounds like a
pirate. Granted, it's been 20 years since you've seen him, but I think
research has shown that extended periods of solitary confinement cause
more mental breakdowns than they correct.
Finally: during one really
quite fantastic travel sequence to a magical spirit realm, they play a
song with discernable lyrics. I'd have preferred it if they'd used the
more unintelligible chanting in the rest of the game, but maybe that's
just me.
Now, for the good bits: The world is even more
interactive than before. One really cool addition is the ability to
"tap" on almost anything. Doing so produces a very quiet sound that is
more or less what you'd expect to hear if you tapped such an object:
wood, metal, water, whatever. If tapping on something would reasonably
cause a visible effect, that appears as well: water ripples, pans
vibrate. Sometimes the effects are two way- touching fire or a powered
circuit board makes your ghostly hand recoil, accompanied by a
painful-sounding hiss or zap. There's more life than ever before: one
world in particular has no less than five different kinds of
more-or-less interactive creature, and you'll likely have some
interesting encounters with each of them, whether it's being snubbed by
fish-eating karnak or narrowly avoiding dismemberment by a hungry
camoudile.
The puzzles, of course, are a central aspect of the game,
and be thankful that there's a built-in guide. If you know someone who's
puffed up on his own intelligence, get him this game. He'll be weeping
within hours. Simply put, they're hard. Really hard. Of course, it
didn't help that I had to wait 2-5 seconds between each screen. Had I
possessed the resources, I'd have done a full install and maybe avoided
looking for hints simply because I didn't want to waste more time and
maybe risk my computer crashing from memory shortage by going back to
check that symbol-covered panel AGAIN. Though you can take pictures of
nearly anything and look at them at will, a weaker graphics card like
mine puts visual garbage over the pictures and so lowers the usefulness
of that feature. Keep pen and paper handy.
If you liked Myst,
you'll probably like Revelation. If you didn't like Myst, why are you
reading this?
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