UrU

I've just popped Myst Uru: The Complete Chronicles into my green custom-kit PC ('Biolante' from here on,) and loaded it all up. It's great eye candy, and with the new 3D aspect it brings out a more interesting look that easily surpasses the orignal Myst (of which I still have.) I won't bore you with the details--it's not hard to find.

Unfortuantly, early on into the game--specifically 'The Cleft,' to exact, since I can't redo that Age until I get the Relto Book, I seem to have issues. Primarly, it seems that someone forgot about a very important rule of Game Design. It's a very critical one, IMO, as you can't sell a game without it.

I'm reffering to User-Friendly Interfaces. One should never fuck this one up. I can't stress this part.

In the case of Uru, this primarily involves the world itself, as it is the vehicle for interaction. Let me point out one of the cases involved here. I'm speaking of the bucket that has one of the needed Journey Cloths to open the Relto Door for that particular Book. It's set up so that you need to push a foot-lever to release the bucket so you can touch the Cloth obviously on its side. But this is where the messed up. When you build a first level/stage, you want it to help teach the player on what to do. That means that they can poke and prod multiple things before they figure it out.

But! It turns out that when you use the foot-lever, without any power on, it does its 'not on' action and stays untriggerable even when the power is turned on. Big no-no there. I had to restart with a fresh new game. (I liked my avatar in that one; I made him a near-duplicate of myself, straight down to the glasses. Just no belly.)

And a second critical flaw happened, with the same object. I went ahead and turned on the power before even coming anywhere close to the ledge the foot-lever was on. Pushed it, and made the bucket go down so I could reach it. And I was unable to touch the Cloth, when it was obvious that you can easily touch the damned thing! Is it some sort of 'you need to register before continuing' thing? 'Cuz if I made this, and wanted that, I'd stick it in the Relto Book instead, in big red letters, where the players would be movitated to send Ubisoft their info, instead of being pissed off at being so close to finishing this Age!

I'm looking into this. Someone needs to send me a patch, damnit.

It also bears mentioning that I get pissed when they (game designers) forget to include subtitles for their spoken dialogue. I'm rated as moderately to severely hearing impaired in both ears--although that's up for question these days, thanks to my left ear. (I can hardly hear shit out of it, and I wear that side's hearing aid without a battery for convience's sake.) And out of courtesy, I keep the speakers off on my computer--I play them loud enough for me to hear, but too loud for the other two normal-hearing people in the house. (That's why I love the Closed captioning on the TV.)

It's so trivial, code/art-wise. Even Blizzard did it for their FMV sequences in WarCraft3. Yet, for a game like Myst, with a deep storyline and history--which, I admit, comes from mostly books, but I haven't touched anything beyond the orignal Myst. And that still needs some subtitles just for the funny stuff Artus' sons say. (I'm not kidding--their ranting and threats sound funny just because they're two meglomaniacs trapped in books.)

Uru, unfortuantly, suffers the same issue when you punch the button in Yeesha's workroom. Despite that it's neat to have a holographic projection in-game of her, there will always be people with hearing difficulties playing these sorts of games. And it reflects badly on the company if they can't provide alternatives in-game.

Shitlist.addTo("Cyan Worlds");