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[quinnr]

I never actually played any of their previous games.  Do they follow the traditional 'combine the wrench with the salmon to make a chair that can be used to bribe the traffic warden to let you play the piano in the orphanage' adventure game path?

No but someof the puzzles there are downright evil.
The first "Myst" even got itself a parody called "Pyst" showing the island from the first game wrecked by angry players (Pyst get it? Haha!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyst

Oh man. This made me laugh pretty hard, Myst made me so angry. I don't think I ever got very far in it, though, and I've been meaning to take another look at it, but all I can remember is obnoxious buttons that you had to press for ages until you figured out how to press them correctly. :S

[Draco18s]

The Mystery of the Nautilus? Never heard of it until now, and judging from the hits I'm getting, neither has the rest of the internet... Here's one of the only informative links I could find on it: http://www.gameboomers.com/reviews/Mm/MysteryNautlisbyRick36.htm

The internet only goes back to about 2002.
That is, finding anything older than that, if it wasn't wildly popular, is exceedingly difficult.
(The earliest evidence I can find of my own activities, is a post on Dec 23, 2003* asking for help ditching AOL--clearly there were earlier posts, but there are no archives that have it).

*Or was it 2002?  Even though I went looking fairly recently, the year is a little fuzzy.

[Darkmere]

I never actually played any of their previous games.  Do they follow the traditional 'combine the wrench with the salmon to make a chair that can be used to bribe the traffic warden to let you play the piano in the orphanage' adventure game path?

No but someof the puzzles there are downright evil.
The first "Myst" even got itself a parody called "Pyst" showing the island from the first game wrecked by angry players (Pyst get it? Haha!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyst

Oh man. This made me laugh pretty hard, Myst made me so angry. I don't think I ever got very far in it, though, and I've been meaning to take another look at it, but all I can remember is obnoxious buttons that you had to press for ages until you figured out how to press them correctly. :S

At least Myst had clues around that you could find if you were paying attention. One or two of the solutions took a bit more than average work, but it was nothing compared to reverse-engineering an entire fictional culture from surface details to get anywhere in Riven.

The internet only goes back to about 2002.

... Nope. Not even close. More than a decade off, in fact.

[Sensei]

Anyone remember a game of this genre with "Atlantis" in its name? You start on a ship, and there's a shiny ball, I never managed to get further than that, and I can't find it on Google.
I remember really liking the atmosphere though.

Hey, I remember that! It was utter shite all around, you didn't miss much. I'm pretty sure it was called Nautilus...

The Mystery of the Nautilus? Never heard of it until now, and judging from the hits I'm getting, neither has the rest of the internet... Here's one of the only informative links I could find on it: http://www.gameboomers.com/reviews/Mm/MysteryNautlisbyRick36.htm

Yes, that's the one! I recognize the cover. I tried to look it up once before, and couldn't find it, in fact I didn't when I looked around briefly making that post. I'm pretty sure the reason the internet hasn't heard of it is because it was a straight-to-bargain-bin game that never got publicity in the first place. Like I said, I could never do more than finish the first puzzle and explore a couple rooms before it crashed.

[Draco18s]

The internet only goes back to about 2002.

... Nope. Not even close. More than a decade off, in fact.

You obviously missed the meaning behind my post.

Yes, the internet itself goes back to 1991, I should know, I was using it pretty early on (obviously not at the age of 6, but definitely by 12).

My point was that finding anything that was posted that early is really freaking difficult.  There's an entire website/forum/game guide that I used to use heavily back in high school that not only doesn't exist any more, there are no references to its existence.  As in, I can't even figure out what it's URL was in order to attempt to retrieve it from the Wayback Machine.  Assuming it was archived in the first place, which is questionable, as I was using it 1999-2000.

Some little known games released during that era?  Probably only hit a small corner of the internet, which was never archived, and which has since been taken down.

Hell, all major usenet activity pre-2002 is not archived.  Google simply didn't have the server architecture prior to then (or didn't exist!) in order to save copies of every post of every group.  And usenet goes back waaaay farther than the internet in general.

[ductape]

When I was a kid, to have internet we used a bunch of soup cans and string and wired them around the neighborhood. Then we would make horrible screeching noises into the cans, that was the analog days.

Wait, I think I am in the wrong thread.

Myst kinda sucked, but at the time the art was nice. Compared to some of the contemporary games in the same genre like Kings Quest, all the Infocom stuff, Leisure Suit Larry, and others - Myst was pretty weird in the puzzle department, in a not very fun way if I remember right.

[Sensei]

Myst kinda sucked, but at the time the art was nice. Compared to some of the contemporary games in the same genre like Kings Quest, all the Infocom stuff, Leisure Suit Larry, and others - Myst was pretty weird in the puzzle department, in a not very fun way if I remember right.

I really did like a lot of puzzles in the Myst games, especially compared to the inventory item flavor of puzzles. More subjective, and this really matters when you get stuck on a puzzle for hours, I loved the artwork and music in Riven and onwards (hell, the music in the original Myst). There's so much to look at and in my opinion it's probably the most atmospheric and evocative locales in any video game series. A big part of finishing a puzzle is the reward of seeing a new area. Even if you just give up and use a guide to get through, you can still look at all the cool stuff and hear all the music- though that's not as rewarding.

That said, it was pretty much never exciting, to be sure.

[Darkmere]

The internet only goes back to about 2002.

... Nope. Not even close. More than a decade off, in fact.

You obviously missed the meaning behind my post.

Ah yes. That I did. I took your post literally as "there was no internet before '02" (Which I had been using for 4 years or so by then) instead of "The current internet archives do not extend much farther back than 2002," which thinking about Geocities sites makes me believe is for the best.

Sorry about that, subtextual comprehension fail on my part.

games in the same genre like Kings Quest, all the Infocom stuff, Leisure Suit Larry, and others - Myst was pretty weird in the puzzle department, in a not very fun way if I remember right.

I don't think I'd lump Myst (and 7th Guest) into the same category as those, though. I mean, they were both about solving puzzles in a way, but the adventure games like all those came with an inventory system and were mostly tests of player logic. Myst and T7G were purely about solving puzzles, with no inventory management to fall back on where you could just combine stuff til it worked out. I guess a good comparison would be that the SCUMM-type games (I was raised on Sam & Max Hit the Road) felt more like reading a book to me, while Myst and T7G felt more like working through a book of unrelated brain-teaser inductive reasoning tests with a few linked quotes at the bottom of each page. There simply weren't enough Myst-alikes to make a separate genre, so they got lumped in with infocom and all that.

[Sappho]

I failed miserably at Myst and Riven and fell back on walkthroughs to get past many parts. However, I always preferred this type of game to the King's Quest type. Most of the point-and-click adventure games don't just "allow" you to randomly combine items until something works, they *require* it, because there's no real way of using logic to figure out what's expected of you. You know that there's a solution, but the only way to find it is to use brute force to just click everything until something happens. You don't know what you're trying to do until it's already done.

In Myst and Riven, the puzzles may have been insanely hard (many of them were just crazy, like building the counting system from written fragments around the world and then using the hangman game to link the symbols with the numbers they represented), but I always felt like at least you knew what you were trying to accomplish. I know I need to figure out what these symbols mean, so I can search until I find the answer, and then it will take some serious cleverness on my part to put it all together - but at least I know what I'm looking for. It feels like a *puzzle* rather than just a series of clever easter eggs that comprise the entire game, and the gameplay is just random clicking looking for the easter eggs.

Edit: Aha, I found a playthrough of Pyst. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fo-DH8VlsM

Edit 2: Hm... Pyst doesn't actually look very funny. Shame.

[Draco18s]

Just as a reminder:
67 hours left and they're ~$3,000 short of their goal.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction

[Aoi]

Just as a reminder:
67 hours left and they're ~$3,000 short of their goal.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction

And in the last 5 hours, they evidently made ~25k. Huh.

[Draco18s]

And in the last 5 hours, they evidently made ~25k. Huh.

And in 4 more, another 10k.