an opinion about saturday night

Well, you know you're at a sad spot in your life when, instead of spending a Saturday night out with friends, meeting women and forging social connections you are sitting at home playing a fifteen year old videogame on a fourteen year old game system.

But, I just spent my Saturday night replaying the Saturn port of Resident Evil, so what do I know?

It's hard to tell people whether or not they will like Myst. It's a very specific sort of game, and odds are you will either love it deeply or hate it fiercely. It's very slow paced, cerebral, and thought-provoking. You won't be finding weapons and shooting monsters, ever. It's the only Saturn game I have ever played where I have felt compelled to take pen-and-paper notes on each scene so that I could piece clues together later. The game is heavy on puzzles, and they will occasionally require information from a different part of the environment, meaning you may have to do a bit of traveling to fully understand them.

It's less of a first person game and more of an interactive slideshow, but you will probably know in the first five or ten minutes whether or not you will enjoy the game.

Myst for the Saturn supports the Saturn Mouse, if you have one. It also supports the "zap to" feature (I forget what it is called exactly, but it allows you to skip areas you have already been through). I would recommend turning it off, since if you use it extensively you will likely miss clues.

Picking up a complete copy for $5 is a pretty good score, though. Playing Myst is a good idea, because even if you end up hating it, you can see what gaming was like way back when CD-Rom technology was still in it's infancy, and you can play a game that was (until the advent of the ridiculous amount of Sims games released) the highest selling game of all time.

But, considering it is pretty much Sunday morning by now, you've likely already played the game and made your own opinion of it.