A Bar That Won’t Lead You Astray: The Stray Sheep
D(LC)elightful Treats 05-20-12: Pinball, Supervillains, & Robots
Mother 3 on Consumerism, Art, and Death: “Strange. Funny. Heartrending.”
Kusoge Club – Deadliest Warrior Legends
Hard Corner: BERSERK special
Posted By ChaosD1 about 3 months, 1 week ago
The polarizing puzzle and exploration game has an MMO? Find out how it works in this episode! (This is a backlog episode, originally reviewed in October 2011. New MMO Grinder episodes are posted roughly every two weeks.)
Follow ChaosD1 or MMO Grinder on Twitter.
Look for MMO Grinder on Facebook.
Also, Visit MMOGrinder.net for episode suggestions, updates and polls.
I have actually bought this game twice – once new when my computer fucked up and I couldn’t play it after the initial time. The second time buying the cyan games steam bundle…I have not had a chance to play this online I love the atmosphere but it is the sort of thing where I would only really want to play it with someone all the way. I will have to see if anyone in my group of friends would be interested in exploring it together while talking on skype or something.
Geez you scared me with the shouting.
This is a game that i might actually pick up, relaxed atmosphere and heavy exploration aspect and body type customization are all things i look for.
I actually did pretty good in Myst. There was only one puzzle that I didn’t solve the first time through by myself, and that was a combination to a safe. I cracked the safe through trial and error, though, and found where the combo was hidden much later.
I’ll probably give this a shot. Although puzzle games aren’t always my cup of tea, I love the ambiance and immersion aspects of the Myst franchise.
About the community: I wonder if the general friendliness of the community might be because games of this type tend to appeal to more thoughtful personality types, and not to people who just generally like to be jerks.
Oh, well ever since the very first game, Myst has been notorious for it’s dark graphics. You just can’t crank the gamma up high enough. It’s also the mother of the Interactive Hidden Object Game branch of casual games. Considering that IHOGs are targeted at housewives, I can only assume Uru has more girl gamers than any MMO.
So I take it there’s no Full Motion Video in the MMO? I’m not sure if that’s a boon or disappointing.
Oh, I thought this went down a year after it went up. I must have misread? Well, I liked the Myst series, so I guess I should add this to my MMO queue.
Look up my post under Semudara, I was there when it was on GameTap shortly before it died again.
Never heard of a MMO of Myst Before although I’ve never played the series but I know of what its about…yeah I’ve been more of an RPG Player as of late.
What do tacos have to do with the Ki? That wasn’t a perfect lead-in at ALL!
Dumb joke aside, I’ve always had an inexplicable fondness for the Myst series despite the very tricky and sometimes downright confusing puzzles, and I’m glad to see that this game is clearly in the right spirit. I had seen it before but quickly wrote it off as a lame spin-off. It actually looks pretty interesting.
I was confused when you mentioned that it’s free, since you can buy URU: Complete Chronicles on Steam for about $10. It includes two expansion packs, but apparently those are also included in the free download from ‘mystonline.com’, so…..I guess people have the option of paying ten dollars on Steam for no reason. Weird.
I don’t blame you for the joke. It was my first time watching this episode with a mid-roll ad on and it actually scared me. I’ll probably end up pulling them anyway, since they aren’t making enough of a difference to be worth it.
Then again, what doesn’t perfectly lead into tacos?
I didn’t know about the Steam thing, as it seems only lately that Steam has be into the idea of porting over Free-To-Play games into its service, so I didn’t know it was on there when I made this. That is weird that they charge you, though.
Ok, I actually looked into it, and it seems that pack is left over from August of 2010… and I think this game went free in… February of 2010. Ok, that does make absolutely no sense.
What you are actually paying for is the Single Player\Stand Alone version. It was made soon after the first time the game failed back in Jan 2003, due to not gaining enough momentum, that instead of wasting it, decided to release it as just Uru Offline-Mode with a added expansion pack attached.
Some years later, Uru was picked up again by new gaming-subscription service GameTap and was funded for a year before kicking the can because of lack of players. Usually in the lower hundreds at its peak probably and could barely get above 50 people at the end of its cycle a year later. It was packed with a lot more content and things to do than the Offline version, but it faded into obscurity because it’s a slow puzzle game.
Cyan Worlds, the creators of the series, soon went bankrupt and shut down all operations. But shortly after, the creators wrangled through legal hell and bought out the game\licenses outright in order for the game to stay afloat with the remaining fan base. To this day, it enjoys a very small, niche audience as a multiplayer puzzle game with its relaxing and nuanced atmosphere.
I first found out about this game soon after it shuddered and was taken in by the atmosphere, even if I sucked at it hard like the previous Myst games were. Puzzles this difficult were never my strong suit, but it was always the art design that brought me back and I appreciate what this game and the series did.