The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

Riven, you may know, is the sequel to the game Myst. If you've never heard of Myst, then all you need to know is that it is a computer game where you have to solve different puzzles to win. The graphics are pretty cool and are punctuated by fairly precisely placed Quick Time movies when something interesting happens.

The long version of the story is that I bought Myst whenever it first came out a while back, more than 10 years ago now, and I really enjoyed it. A couple years ago I was in Circuit City and I happened upon the 10th anniversary edition of Myst that came with its sequel, Riven, and the next sequel, Exile. It was on the sale shelf, if I remember correctly, and I bought it. I played Myst again and remembered how much I loved it. Then I tried to play Riven and I couldn't install it correctly. Then I played Myst 3, and I thought that it might be even better than the original. So as you may have guessed, I was pretty pissed off that I couldn't play Riven.

Like I say, this was a couple years ago and I looked online to see if anyone else was having trouble with the Riven installation in particular and lots of people were. I fixed the problem and was then able to play Riven. Right about that same time, within a couple of days, actually, we moved from one apartment to another, and packed and unpacked all our stuff. In that time, I misplaced the DVD-Roms that those three games were on. Again, this is the long version of the story.

So a couple days ago we were cleaning out one of our closets in the redecoration I mentioned earlier where the garbage room is now going to be the nursery and the computer room is now the computer room and treadmill and piano and turtle room. In the process of cleaning this closet, I found those games, which I was pretty happy about. I remembered that I had a problem installing Riven, but since I had fixed it, I figured it wouldn't be an issue.

I played Myst 3 again, since I really enjoyed it the first time. I had really never actually played Riven, I just walked around the opning boards before we moved those couple years ago, so I wanted to see what it was all about.

I put in the DVD and click on the program and the same thing that was happening before was happening again. The screen would go blank for a second as if the game were going to start and then it would just go back to the Windows desktop.

I searched again online and came up with all sorts of ransom issues it could have been and I didn't remember the first time what I had done. The suggested going into the files in the Riven folder and changing lines of text, or making it playable in a backwards compatible way with Windows 98 as opposed to XP, or downloading one of about ten available patches that do something, and all this random stuff. Also some people mentioned a Quick Time issue that comes up with some installations.

I screwed around with this thing for about 3 hours only to discover that the way to get the Riven program to work was to uninstall Quick Time 7 and reinstall Quick Time 6. How fucking counterintuitive is that? I don't even have words to describe that ridiculousness. And I feel like part of the puzzle in beating Riven is just being able to install the damn program correctly.

Since I bought this 10th anniversary game, they have subsequently released Myst IV and Myst V, which I thought about buying on Amazon or something. When I go to read the reviews, though, both of them have issues not necessarily with the game play, aside from some people complaining that the puzzles are too hard or too easy, but rather with being able to install the programs correctly on their computers because whatever equiptment they have is not compatible with the game. So now I probably won't buy the two sequels, even thought I know I would enjoy them, because I'm afraid I won't be able to play them since apparently some anti-piracy aspect of the discs the games are on makes them automatically incompatible with a huge portion of the people who want to play the game and actually buy it legitimately.

Que ridiculo...ah ha..ah ha ha ha ha ha. (a little obscure, perhaps, especially in writing as opposed to aloud.)