A very long time ago, I spent a week in Southern California, right after the spring semester. Mostly hanging out on the beaches watching bikini babes rollerblading by on the boardwalk, right? Well, obviously not, because I’m me. No, a big part of that time, I played Road Rash on the Sega and Myst on the PC. However, vacation time ran short, and I did not quite have time to finish.

That would be the all too common end to the story, except that one of my friends hit upon the idea of buying the first three boxed together over this holiday weekend. None of us has ever touched Exile, I’ve never played Riven (except for the first ten agonizing minutes or so, after which I got bored and quit), and one of us had never played Myst. Also, none of us particularly remembered how to solve the puzzles, just pieces of the plot. So, we sat down and got to work.

And then, after about six or eight hours of gameplay spread across two days, we finished it. I learned several things from this experience. 1) Ten years down the road, a lot of games have incorporated this kind of puzzle motif, to the extent that what was new and unusual back in the day is now all to easy to spot and understand the purpose of. The paradigm has shifted, and this was certainly the game that did it. 2) Full-motion video has come a long way. 3) When I stopped playing, that early summer all those many years ago? Yeah, I was about 5 minutes from the end of the game.

What a sack of crap.