I mean, I wasn’t in charge of getting them, but learning about it was painful enough. I was young, and faith in humanity hadn’t been burned out of me yet.
I remember this from the school library computers. That and even back then the school had some kind of broadband, it blew my mind that to get online all we had to do was open IE. I was used to that part but always had whatever dial up service we had at the time to open up and connect first. Just clicking IE and going was crazy to me.
I remember before I had the internet wondering why companies had ads for “http://” and others were on “www” and having no clue if I needed to buy a special internet to access each.
No, I played the original Riven on Windows 2000. This looks much worse. For example the embedded videos aren’t aligned properly and they clearly have different color correction so they pop out from the rest of the static images. And, I could be wrong but it just seems much more pixelated or lower color fidelity. I realize having a better quality monitor and higher resolution might explain some of that, but regardless of the technical explanation the user experience becomes worse than playing on contemporary equipment. They should have used a better upscaling algorithm. There were other issues too that I can’t recall at this moment. Just the fact that you get the geek-oriented ScummVM interface in your face when you buy a game is kind of jarring.
Most things you describe are the side effects of displaying a 640x480 game on a modern LCD. I agree, however, that the default settings make the game look worse because of aspect ratio correction and the default nearest neighbor scaler. Both can be improved by either using an SVGA CRT or a pixel shader.
Sweet, I guess I’m going to have to get a PC at some point. I actually played Riven for iPadOS recently and it was still fun, but the point and click is pretty tedious.
I’m not sure a remake willl ever match the magic of when I originally played in 1998, though. My laptop was so junky I played most of the game under a blanket because the screen was so dark, haha.
DUDE. It took me ages (get it!!?) to spot the switch to get in to the elevator on the forest island from the ground level. Thought you had to go the long way around every time.
The bundle of myst games was on humble bundle a week or two ago. I’ve been waiting for the right time to immerse myself in myst VR and be just as confounded as I was as a kid. Then I get to see if Riven is still completely impossible for me.
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