A Myst Hypocrite

After all my bitching last week about virtual reality escapism, I'm wasting my long weekend by playing "Myst IV: Revelation." I bought it years ago but my underpowered video card and out-of-date operating system couldn't handle it. It's still a bit beyond my computer but not so bad that I can't enjoy it (without crashing like it used to).

I love Myst games because of the exploration, and because of the sort-of-logical arrangement of the worlds. You see some pipes and some switches and you dust off your puzzle-solving hat and, next thing you know, you're playing with levers and getting awfully frustrated. Myst is always great when it's logical...but when a puzzle relies on some bizarre visual clue that you may have missed it's just plain frustrating. I HATE walking back and forth endlessly, scouring my cursor over a 360-degree panorama trying to find a clue.

Since the worlds are so big in Myst IV, I'm doing quite a bit of that. But thanks to the built-in help system I am less frustrated than I usually would be.

Myst has never been so beautiful. These ominous weather systems are stunning, and it's fun to just "tap" things...every part of your environment has a sound when you tap it -- paper, wood, metals -- and I like to imagine the poor foley artists: "what do you think THIS shape and type of wood should sound like?"

I've finished the Spire age, and again I have very little patience with trial-and-error math puzzles and obscurely scattered notes. As usual I wonder why the voice acting is so terrible, and why so many Myst games feature villains who scream "No! No! No no no!" I guess if YOUR dad had locked you in an unpopulated Rube Goldberg-type world for decades, YOU'D do a lot of negating as well.

The graphics are stunning. These are games to be savoured. But why am I inside my apartment on such a nice day?

Donald, Gerald, and Robert

I learned a lot of things during my recent trip to Minneapolis, but the most important was how to solve logic puzzles. The fact that I can now tackle a reasonably difficult puzzle is pretty striking, since I used to be hopeless at them.

So when I ran across this classic I just HAD to try and solve it, and I'm proud to say it only took me...errr, fifteen minutes. That might not be so hot but I'M pretty pleased with myself.

"DONALD + GERALD = ROBERT" is a mathematical cryptogram. Each of the ten letters stands for one of the digits from 0 to 9. None of the digits stand for more than one letter. As a starter, the letter "D" stands for "5".

For those of you (like me) who hate puzzles that require trial and error to solve, don't worry; this one is unambiguous.