Unfortunately, traversing the island and solving puzzles requires the ability to utilize high-resolution pictures. On just about every other version of Myst Ive played (including on the iPhone), the pictures are bright and detailed, and its easy to make out every little detail on the screen. This is important, because very often, its the little details that you must investigate to proceed. On the DS, however, Myst looks grainy and low-resolution. I was especially surprised to find that a wall panel early in the game looked more like a splotch on the wall or a spot of light than what it was supposed to be. Another puzzle, involving changing the colors of different symbols, becomes a comical farce when the symbol towers blend right into the trees behind them. As you can imagine, this gets very frustrating very quickly. New Myst players most will suffer the mostwith such bad resolution on the images and no existing memory of what to do next, I can easily see them turning the game off in frustration after an hour of aimless wandering.
The game introduces a few new tools to aid the player along. The first is a map that displays the current location on the top screen. Unfortunately, the view is from quite far away, and its resolution is such that you cant really tell what its showing. I found it to be a useless tool. The second, more helpful tool is a screenshot button. When youre looking at something important, tap the screenshot button to project that image to the top screen. This is handy for solving puzzles, though you can only keep one screenshot at a time. Back in what I like to call the day, of course, we used a pen and paper to solve Myst's puzzles. This DS version also includes Zip Mode, which was integrated into Mysts immediate successors. Zip Mode allows the player to skip around the island, though they may miss out on clues. The menu, displayed as a bar on the bottom of the touch screen, is intrusive. I would have preferred an icon that brought up the menu so that the view could be larger.
The real crime is that Myst simply hasnt aged well. It moves at a very slow pace, and the interface feels a bit clunky at times, especially when negotiating tight spaces (no, I wanted to look back, not to the side!). Mysts descendants ultimately one-upped it at every turn. Riven (the sequel to Myst) improved almost every aspect of the game design, though the puzzles were harder.. The genre has since gone out of style due to its archaic trappings. But if youre chomping at the bit to experience the granddaddy of first-person adventure games (and some would say, first person shooters), then I recommend finding Myst on any other system. The iPhone version is great. Just avoid this DS port, which makes Myst frustrating and ugly.
Pros:
Lastability: 4.0
Compared to every other version of Myst out there, and its descendants, there's very little reason to keep coming back.
Final: 4.0
There is no reason to buy this version of Myst while so many superior versions, and their sequels, are available for a cheap price.
Hal, what made you decide to review Myst for the DS? It's been out in North America for almost 2 years, ad in Europe for 2 1/2.
Is there some NWR policy which doesn't allow reviewers to give out scores of less than 4? Based on the review text it sounds like this game is practically unplayable and worthless, so if this is only so bad as to get a 4, how bad does it need to be to get a worse score? Have there ever been any reviews that gave a score of 2 or 1?
1.0 - Games that score this low are terrible for many more reasons than just a bad gameplay experience. They would have enough technical issues to render a game virtually unplayable. Thankfully, games this horrible are rare, but it can happen. Although we can technically hand out a "0" score, any game functional enough to get past Nintendo's certification process is probably enough to warrant a point.
Interesting, thanks.Quote from: NWR Review Policy1.0 - Games that score this low are terrible for many more reasons than just a bad gameplay experience. They would have enough technical issues to render a game virtually unplayable. Thankfully, games this horrible are rare, but it can happen. Although we can technically hand out a "0" score, any game functional enough to get past Nintendo's certification process is probably enough to warrant a point.
Have there ever been any reviews that gave a score of 2 or 1?List of all NWR reviews, sorted from lowest score to highest (http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/reviews.cfm?order=RevScore&)
