I just finished Persona 3, and I think it may be the best RPG I have ever played. Better than Grandia 3, and better than most if not all of the Final Fantasies. A lot of the Final Fantasy characters blur together in my mind (with some notable exceptions, e.g. Yuna), but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the characters in Persona 3.

This game was bad. In fact, it was exactly the worst amount of bad — bad mixed in with just enough good that I couldn’t just give up on it. Here’s what they did. They started with a classic Myst style, then carefully excised two of the things that made Myst great.

The first thing they excised was the interface. URU takes the well-loved Myst-style interface and replaces it with a 3-D world that you explore via a customizable avatar. Myst was far better as plain old Myst than as a bastard hybridization of Myst and Tomb Raider.

The second thing they excised was the puzzles. No, I’m not kidding. URU is Myst with no puzzles. Instead of solving puzzles, you just explore the Ages. You explore every inch of the Ages, because there are cleverly concealed swatches of cloth, and you must tag all of them before you can clear the level. Myst was far better as plain old Myst than as a bastard hybridization of Myst and Banjo-Kazooie.

That said, I haven’t been quite fair to URU. There are actually a few puzzles. There are some pretty cool ones in Kadish Tolesa, and the third third of the game, Path of the Shell, is fairly puzzleful. I can’t say that I agree with the game mechanic of making the player wait 15 real time minutes to solve a puzzle, but at least there were puzzles.

And of course, it’s beautiful. The D’ni ages are all kind of grey and brown buildings, but the other ages are very pretty, and the concept behind Ahnonay was especially cool. It’s too bad there weren’t really quite enough clues for the game to be self-contained. And no coherent ending — the game was a work in progress.

If, after reading this, you still want to play Myst URU, here are my suggestions for how to play it and actually make it an enjoyable experience. I’ll list them in order of importance.

1. Go in order. Play Ages Beyond Myst first (the leftmost clump of books, the ones inside the Relto sky island pedestals), then after you finish that, play To D’Ni (the three books with the A-frame symbol on them), then after you finish that, play Path of the Shell (the best of the three). That’s the one with the five books with the shell sign on them. I got overwhelmed because I hopped back and forth between what are largely three separate games.
2. When you get to the Egg Room with the five Linking Stones, go to the back-left Linking Stone first. That will save you a ton of wasted exploration and annoyance.
3. Use UHS or a walkthrough to find all the journey cloths and Great Zero Markers. It just isn’t fun to wander around the level over and over again looking for the random doodad you missed the first time around.
4. Make liberal use of UHS. There are a lot of puzzles that, in my opinion, don’t give enough clues to be figured out in a self-contained way. Remember now, I’ve played through all the Myst games and I didn’t need very many hints. But in URU, I needed quite a few hints just to keep myself from screaming in frustration.

Enjoy! Or not! Your choice. (:

I just finished Rhem 3, and I liked it a lot.

When I looked at the cover, I thought “Sigh, another Myst knockoff.” And yes, it is a Myst knockoff, but it’s no Crystal Key. It’s very well done, and a huge amount of fun, if and only if you love puzzles. There is no plot. The scenery isn’t breathtaking or fanciful like in Myst. It’s well rendered, and I did indeed gasp with amazement like I did in Myst, but for different reasons. In Myst, I gasped at the many beautiful and awe-inspiring views, landscapes, and structures. In Rhem, I gasped at the sheer vastness of the place. “Oh my God, it’s another entire new area!” I would exclaim quite often.

In a sense, Rhem 3 is one enormous puzzle. Many actions you take in one area will cause you to backtrack to an entirely different area to reap the consequences of your initial action. But it’s not arbitrary non-local effects (which I hate). If you follow the pipe connected to that button, and follow it, and figure out where it comes out on the other side when it goes into that wall… it will eventually lead you to the place where the non-local effect happens.

My favourite instance of this is how there are tons of clues scrawled on the backs of doors. There will be a door that can only be opened and closed from one side. You have to close it, then make a huge winding loop around the entire game to get to the other side of the door to see the clue. Similarly for elevators and such. I really like that kind of puzzle. It requires really knowing your way around the area and becoming holistically familiar with Rhem. You can’t just have a separate page of notes for each area, because they are all connected. All eight pages of notes worth. (: Maps were very important, and I really enjoyed mapping out the different areas. It was HARD, because the world is so intrinsically 3-D. Sometimes I’d need to know what was directly under me or above me, and that was very challenging to map accurately.

I loved the puzzles in Rhem 3. There was a really cool puzzle where two bridges could be either up or down, and when they were up they could be used as ladders. A tricky sequence of ups, downs, platform manipulations and crossovers was needed to get to all the various places. A lot of them are like “Oh, I’ve seen that set of symbols before! They’re paired with this other set of symbols, and this other set of symbols is the key to unlock this puzzle.”

Minor spoilers ahead.

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Super Mario Galaxy (Wii): Totally awesome. Very innovative, almost as innovative as Mario 64 was. It’s the first game of its class in which I never once wanted to move the camera. That in itself is a laudable achievement. I also think the co-op mode is really innovative; they perfected a way for players of different skill levels (or interest levels) to play together, by having the second player be a backup that can help the first player out and doesn’t (often) hinder the first player. This is totally awesome — a game that parents and kids can play together and enjoy!

Cave Story (PC): Really great, and free! Kind of reminds me of Metroid. It’s even got replay value if you’re super hardcore and want to get to the secret ending.

Portal (PC): Very cool, but unfortunately evil.

DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) (PC): Totally awesome. I heard about this game a lot but never saw what all the fuss was about. It’s just an overhead turn-based puzzle game, right? What could be interesting about that? Well, DROD is excellently great. It’s actually got a plot! (Well, moreso in the sequels, but still.) And plenty of interesting new monsters, traps, and new game elements on each level. I’m currently frustrated with level 16, but I’ll pick it back up again. I haven’t gotten a hint yet, and I’m just being stubborn. (:

Donkey Kong Barrel Blast (Wii): Horrible, uninteresting, and boring.

Mario Party 8 (Wii): Strangely compelling, if you don’t care about skill being much of a factor in the outcome of the game.

Metroid Prime 3 (Wii): I usually don’t like FPSs a lot, but this one was quite well done.

Three game elements that are particularly fun for me are:

1. collecting things
2. becoming richer and/or more powerful by collecting those things
3. exploring deeper and deeper, where the depth you can explore is bounded by a combination of skill and resource limit

I’ll talk about some games that exemplify some of these elements.

Atelier Iris 3 definitely has 1, and sort of has 2 and 3. It has a rich crafting system wherein you collect things directly as well as collecting crafted items. Technically you do become richer and more powerful, but it’s more by leveling than by collecting, and you’re pretty overpowered anyway. It does have a system of exploring deeper and deeper — the Alterworlds each have a time limit, so if you piddle around instead of heading straight for the deepest part of the Alterworld, you’ll run out of time and be forced back outside. That would be a really cool and engaging element if it were more difficult to reach the ends of the Alterworlds and if there were more skill involved.

Solar Jetman is a pretty good example of all three. The game’s goal is to collect things, each of which makes you either richer or more powerful. Exploring deeper and deeper into each planet is bounded mainly by skill; you always start off with enough fuel to reach anywhere in the planet. There are a few items that are useful to get past certain areas on certain planets, but other than that it’s not resource limited in that way.

Motherload is the best example I’ve seen of all three. You start out only able to penetrate into the upper layers of the planet, but you collect minerals and sell them for money to upgrade your ship so you can mine deeper and get more valuable minerals so you can sell them for more money to buy more upgrades… It’s very addictive and compelling to me. There are only two things it lacks. One is a lot of skill. The depth to which you can mine is bounded mainly by fuel (resource limit), not skill. The second lack is interesting changes as you go deeper. More valuable minerals appear, boulders appear, then lava pockets appear, but that’s it. It’s exciting to see the more valuable minerals and to watch your fuel to make sure you have enough to get back to the surface, but there isn’t really a lot of exploration per se since there aren’t many interesting features to discover. Despite this lack, however, I find myself drawn to play through Motherload once a year or so.

What other games do you know of that have two or more of these features? Do you find these elements as appealing as I do?

Recently Kyeli and I played through Zillion, one of my favourite games for the Sega Master System. She remarked that I beat it very quickly, especially after not having played it for 15 years, so I decided to do a speed run of it. I know I’m not a speedrun-quality player; most of the speedruns you’ll see on Speed Demos Archive and similar sites have runs with very few mistakes that are played almost perfectly. I’m just a dabbler, not a hardcore speedrunner. But perhaps my first “straw man” attempt will inspire someone else to do a better job of it. (:

Here is the route that I intend to take through the game. The pink line is the route in, and the yellow line is the escape route. I think it’s an optimal route without saving Apple or Champ, without using Warp B, and without exploiting any glitches, but I might have missed something. The curved arrow after getting the first Zillion gun upgrade is a Warp A.

I’m still practicing — I’ll post a link to a video as soon as I get a clean (albeit slow) full run.