Yes, this adventurer's journal now has videos, straight from my steampunk adventurer's steam phone.
Let's enter the land formerly known as the land of Myst!!
I'm just where I saved from last time. Suck on that. 3DO save functions work for at least 4 months. Bite it, PlayStation fanpersons.
I explored some of the game engine on this trip. Pressing B or C brings you to the Options screen, no picture included. Your only choices are Load, Save, Speed and Quit. I put my cursor on Fast but it was too fast and I couldn't press the buttons. I wholeheartedly recommend: MEDIUM SPEED.
As you can see from these shots, the actual area of interaction in the game is a pretty small rectangle in the middle of the screen. It seems the latter 1/5ths of the screen are for turning.
All these images will probably start being as huge as hell because I don't feel like resizing them anymore. If anyone wants to be my copy writing assistant please send me an e-mail to apply.
I descend the steps into this pool and I am greeted by some music. I actually didn't think? Know? Myst had any music. I probably actually read about it. I think when I had played it on the PC over 18 years ago - yikes - the computer I played on had no speakers. On the docks there is no music, just some ambient waves crashing, gulls making gull-like noises. However, near this strange pool I was greeted by a calming track most fresh:
This video is real bad, but I wasn't the one who decided to put the camera on the back of the phone and the mic on the front.
Here's the pool when you interact with it. Some sort of grid, stars and wheels or something or other. I couldn't do anything else with it and as far as I can tell, there is no inventory, so I just decided to leave. Goodbye pool in the bunker.
I went back out onto the pier and started going forward. All over the island or archipelago or fjord or whatever the hell this is I have found many of these switches either on the path, or near the front of buildings. I have flipped them rapidly but to no avail. They have all started in the down position, at least thus far, so I've flipped them all up. I'm sure it is some heinous trick where I'll have to read a bunch of bullshit riddles and figure out which ones need to be up, which ones down and walk around the whole damn island flipping them all again but I just don't care.
As far as I can tell, everything in Myst is meant to be touched, rapidly and repeatedly.
I go up these stairs and find some more stairs. There are lots of stairs here! I found a note!
Let's grab that trinket:
I don't know if this is because the 3DO version is awful, or because I'm using composite cables on a humongous plasma TV or if the innate challenge of the game is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. As far as I can tell, it says:
Catherine,
I've left for you a message of utmost importance in our fore-chamber beside the dock. Enter the number of Marker ??????? (Surkhes? What the fuck!) on this island map into the imager to retrieve the message.
Yours,
????? (Alrus? Anus? man what the hell)
Am I Catherine? Am I someone else? Am I a voiceless, soundless creature with one lingering disembodied hand a-la Thing T. Thing (real name of Thing)? Maybe I will find out. I have no idea what number I'm supposed to enter in that pool of magic nor did I see a way too, so to hell with Mr. Anus. Goodbye!
I continue onward up and to the right and find this door. I flipped the switch and opened the door.
It appears to be a dentist's chair. Or perhaps the lounge of a post-modern psychiatrist. I am wary of it. You can see it looks like a red leather recliner, and hanging over it on an arm is a weird computer bank thing. I interacted with it and apparently mounted it, as the arm swung down and I was confronted with what appears to be the panel for a time travelling machine:
You can grab and drag, or use the arrows to change the values. The months are your standard 12, days 1-31, years 0-9999 (fuck) and I didn't bother with the time after I found out that shit. I thought I could figure it out, as when you change the values that little light right above the hand starts flashing at different speeds, and also makes different tones, varying from quiet to loud and from deep to sharp. I tried to get the tone as loud as possible by scrolling through the month and days but when I found out there were 9999 years I gave up. I will come back when I obtain more clues.
Here I discover that everyone sucks and everything is fucked:
However, there was a cool part to this lair. In nearly every shack or room or dungeon, if you turn around (or when you're leaving), you will find a switch, panel, etc, next to the doorway you can interact with. In this clubhouse it was a blue switch so I jammed it off. All the lights in the room went off and, as in a planetarium, a star map appeared overhead! You can even look at it, but I found no clues, only mental placidity, for a time:
It reminds me of the 3DO start up sequence.
Anyway, I went along the path. There was some sort of Acropolis to the right, and another stone pool with a model ship in it but I ran right by it and didn't take any pictures. Beyond that is a forest path.
I think this is the forest to the behind-left of where you star on the pier. However, this is Myst, a land of magic and whatever else and it could be anywhere in the damn world.
Directly to my right was another mystical bunker. I flipped a "Myst switch" which is what I will call those levers. Actually, there are a lot of switches and levers in this game so maybe I will call them as to what they appear to be, that lever Chewbacca uses when Han says "Hit it, Chewie!" in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. So, from now on I will call them MFCHDLs (Millennium Falcon Chewbacca Hyper Drive Levers). I pulled the MFCHDL and went in. I heard in my head (maybe not then, but now I hear it as I right this) the fake harmonica solo in Glass Tiger's song, Someday. I've extended the whole damn thing for your pleasure:
At the bottom of this hell bunker I found what appears to be a control lounge for a row of generators. I pushed every button (those red things) and they fired up with an ominous whine, but nothing blew up so I left them on. Initially the number on the right was rising as I pushed them but I screwed it up somehow and could only get the number on the left to go to 99. I tried exiting and re-entering but it didn't reset. Fuck it!
As I turned to leave I saw a helpful diagram. Why wouldn't they post it next to the control panel? "Oh yeah, let me mash my hand into all these buttons like I'm playing electrical engineer whack-a-mole yeehaw!!" I'm surprised nothing blew up, but I guess Myst is reverse real-life consequences.
My general power is rocking a 99. My power to spaceship, unfortunately, is 0. A spaceship? Where? Why? I don't know. Myst is a game of not knowing shit. When I fired up Myst and started to play through it reminded me a lot of being hunk as hell on Monday mornings and walking to work. No reason why, no help, no solutions, just fuck. Plain 'ol fuck.
I left this miserable generator dungeon and went back out into the forest. Down the path, to the clock tower/lighthouse structure out in the middle of the ocean seen the picture previously. Here's some wheels and a red button.
This one was pretty simple, even for a big dumb idiot like myself. I though hey, maybe I should somewhat try to line up the wheels to the big and little hands of the clock tower (see, big and little wheels! Wow!! Man I'm real smart. This is about the extent of my puzzle solving skills). Even though the wheels seem bizarrely restricted, I somehow got them to line up to the clock's hands (which change every time you turn from the control panel and then look back to the clock, so you only have one chance/red button push for each "time") and all those clock gears sprang up from the depths of Myst's Ecto Cooler Bay.
I ran right in!
You can drag and pull down either lever on the side of this contraption. This rotates the tumblers. The left handle spins the top two tumblers, and the right the bottom two. It starts off at all 3s. The big lever to the right just seems to reset it - if you look to the top left you can see the counter-weight type thing hanging at its top/starting position. I tried a few runs of this but couldn't figure out what it wanted me to do. I did eventually line it up to 1 - 2 -3 and it made a click, but I couldn't interact with anything extra nor notice any changes to the room and was afraid to pull the reset handle. I just left it like that. This is some sort of junior Rubix Cube shit and I'm pretty confident I will never be able to figure out how it works (either the real Rubix Cube or the Myst baby version).
I went back up the wooded path to the building directly opposite the generator bunker. I forgot to take a picture of the panel in this one. It was a picture of a tree on the left, in the middle was a boiler looking thing, and on the right a big red wheel you could turn "on" or "off". I only say this because I don't know what it was doing. I turned it clockwise til it stopped and heard an increasing rushing sound. I thought I was opening some flood gates to mercifully take my Myst life and free me from this impossible game, but nothing happened. Here's a picture of the way out:
That thing on the right is a safe. It has a lever to open and three tumblers, numbers 0-9 like any lock. No idea why, or what, or anything about it. I tried a few combinations (all 0s, 1-2-3, 7-7-7) and gave up. I will never be a good thief.
Back on the path I noticed these post things on the sides of the path. I didn't think I could interact with them, but if I turned and put the hand right on them it would run up. You could interact and make the snake light up, briefly, green or red. I made it green and a wonderful electric hum sounded. There were a bunch of these all over and I got real disgruntled. There was also a spider and maybe a bat? Or a surfboard. It actually looked a little like the Green Goblin's glider. Whatever. I was pissed at this point.
Then, I turned and noticed in the background just beyond the left of the Pantheon -- a spaceship!! Straight out of an Arthur C, Clarke cover. Also in sight to the left and right are the gold power poles on four legs with a box on top, and in the foreground the pool with the boat (I tried to interact with it but it just takes you back to the path view).
At this point I was so mindstacked I had to quit.
