This could make a good drinking game – anytime you see something related to the number five in Riven, have a drink. That doesn’t stop Gehn from obsessing over the number five, which is a magic number in the context of this game. You see, Riven is Gehn’s fifth age and his best writing work, which isn’t saying much considering the world is falling apart on a structural level (bad grammar, maybe?). The fact that there are five CDs and five islands is not just a gimmick, as that number is a recurring motif throughout the game. Look at the artwork closely, as it contains some veiled hints about the puzzles and the context of the story. Riven has a similar, but somewhat subtler approach. Some adventure games provide printed documents like journals and codebooks with the CDs to create puzzles before the game has even started. ![]() The original packaging includes a very well done box for the game discs and each CD sleeve has some interesting artwork on it. ![]() Unlike its predecessor, this game has only one main age, the eponymous Riven, which is separated in five islands. Riven starts out where Myst ends, with Atrus giving you the mission he was alluding to in the previous game: save his wife Catherine from the age of Riven and make sure his father Gehn remains trapped there and unable to cause trouble. The game featured many more videos, fullscreen ones, including mine cart and hover train rides between the game’s islands which were eye-poppers for the day. The game was once again made out of stills created with HyperCard, but the level of detail increased exponentially and the black borders around the game window are almost gone. The 2500 images of Myst would become 4000 images on an adventure spanning five islands and an equal number of CDs. Riven was the best looking game of its day, and reaches levels of photorealism very praiseworthy even by today’s standards. In 1997, it was something the world had never seen. After the game was finished, Robyn Miller decided to leave Cyan to pursue personal projects, which means that Rand Miller would then become the sole spiritual father of the franchise. The development of the game was apparently pretty tense, as it understandably is for a relatively new team thrust into a big-budget project that lasted four years. ![]() This was not going to happen with a rag-tag team of seven people, so the Miller brothers hired new 3D artists, bought new computers and upgraded their offices. Since they were now basically drowning in money, Cyan decided that their next project was going to be bigger, better and more expensive – as in multi-million dollar expensive. Myst was a runaway hit and sold millions of copies.
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