Myst IV: Revelation

Final score: D (30/100)
Published by Ubisoft for the PC

Roman numerals are often a sign of trouble, a desperate cry to be taken more seriously than one appears. Thurston Howell III, Rocky VI, and SuperBowl XXIII come to mind. So it is with Myst IV: Revelation.

The story of Myst, involving a world-building couple and their two sons, has been recycled so many times that it's now 90% post-consumer waste. There's nothing left here dramatically, so the player experience in this latest installment comes down to how well the game executes the standard Myst formula of offering beautiful graphics and sound as you encounter and solve a series of puzzles.

Because Myst IV is primarily about finding and solving puzzles, they need to be top-notch. Unfortunately, these puzzles are not even close. Several puzzles require endless trial-and-error to figure out the rules and find a solution. Perhaps fearing that this wasn't tedious enough, the designers made the mechanics of several puzzles so slow and difficult that simply making moves takes forever. Even when you know the answer, it can take 5 or 10 dull, click-and-drag minutes to execute it. Woe to you if you get so bored you make a mistake, forcing you to start over. And then to top things off, sometimes timing matters: after a few minutes of making moves, the last two have to happen in quick succesion, or you not only don't solve the puzzle, but it's left in some awkward state you now have to unravel before you can try again.

Let's drop in on an imaginary meeting at Myst IV design headquarters, shall we? The designer is breathlessly pitching a game section. "And then at this point, the player gets thrown off the cliff and ends up deep in the jungle below, which looks beautiful. He's completely lost, and the jungle is so rich and complicated that it will be almost impossible for him to keep track of where he is or where he's been. So he'll just have to wander at random through a dozen screens or more and hope something happens." Someone raises his hand and asks, "Why is that fun?" The designer replies, "Didn't you listen? I said it would look beautiful! Gorgeous! Tons of flowers and plants everywhere. And animals too. And they'll be animated, and make chattering sounds." "I heard you," says our timid voice of reason, "But the player is lost, and maybe going in circles. He has no idea what's going on, and for minutes on end he's just clicking here and there without purpose. Why is that fun?" The designer rolls his eyes. "I'm talking beautiful computer graphics on every screen! You obviously don't know a thing about what makes a great game."

Many of the Myst IV puzzles are designed to be impenetrable unless you've found the hidden clues. In a game that works so hard to create a story, these hidden clues make no sense at all. Why, for example, would a person who's been completely isolated for 15 years leave hidden notes to himself in inconvenient, out-of-the-way places that are far from the place where those notes would be useful? Why, to make the game harder for the player, of course.

Like its predecessors, Myst IV looks beautiful. The sounds are great. Some of the gameplay is poorly implemented (moving from one place to another always subjects you to a frustrating 2 or 3 second delay, even when you simply turn around and go right back where you were a moment ago). The Myst story is worn so thin that it's practically transparent by now. The puzzles are made artificially complex by obscurity, and some are simply a long and unpleasant slog to complete, even when you know exactly how to solve them. This game finally grinds the Myst franchise into the ground. With any luck, that's where it will stay.

Pikmin 2

Final score: A (90/100)
Published by Nintendo for the GameCube

The original Pikmin was a small delight of a game (in my December 2001 review I gave it 90/100, faulting it only for being too short). In that game, your spaceship crash-landed on a garden world full of flowers, insects, and bugs. It was also inhabited by the Pikmin, a race of small, brightly-colored but dimwitted creatures who had no goal in life other than to cheerfully follow you around and carry out any of a half-dozen commands (e.g., go over here, attack this bug, or carry this thing). The goal was to use the Pikmin to collect the scattered pieces of your ruined spaceship in order to return home.

In Pikmin 2 your employer has sent you back to the planet with your partner Louie and a new goal: scout for treasure and bring it home. The garden world is just as you left it, but more so. There are new kinds of Pikmin to play with, lots of new insects to defeat as you go treasure hunting, large new areas to explore, and multi-level caves to spelunk.

Pikmin 2 is a jewel of a video game that's primarily about free-form puzzle solving. You're given an environment containing bugs and scattered junk, a bunch of your Pikmin friends, and a real-time clock that starts at sunrise. Your job is to do whatever you want, however you want to go about it, to get some of the treasure back to your ship by sundown. Playing is a process of exploring the environment and planning ways to use your little guys to knock down walls, build bridges, harvest berries, carry stuff back to your ship, and attack and defeat insects.

Pikmin 2 succeeds so well because it promises so little, and then surpasses expectations. For example, the game uses artificial intelligence (AI) to manage the swarm of little Pikmin that run around behind you and carry out your orders. It's probably safe to say that most games today, from first-person shooters to chess simulators, have some form of AI in them. But when the AI isn't smart or clever enough, your opponent can make a foolish mistake, and the facade crumbles. In Pikmin 2, the little guys are obviously so dumb and mindlessly eager to please that even when the AI messes up and the Pikmin get themselves in trouble (say by walking into water and starting to drown) you feel worried for them, rather than disappointed by bad programming. In this and many other aspects, the game beautifully sets your expectations low and then casually exceeds them, creating a very positive feeling.

One thing I really liked about the game is that you don't build up skills or abilities as you play. Once you've built up a bunch of each kind of Pikmin, which happens almost immediately, you've maxed out on the gameplay mechanics. From that point on it's all about exploring and planning your way through the game.

I'm docking the game 10 points out of 100 for some minor annoyances in gameplay (e.g., if you want to restart a section, you have to reset the console).

But I'm giving it 90 big points and it deserves every one of them.

Donkey Konga

Final score: D (40/100)
Published by Nintendo for the GameCube

This is a nice little idea. Donkey Konga comes with a set of two plastic bongo drums that plug into the Gamecube's controller port. The drums are sensitive to thumps on each drumhead, and to handclaps (thanks to a little microphone hidden in the middle). The game offers 33 songs of different styles, tempos, and difficulty.

When you pick a song, the music starts to play and you see a ribbon of markings roll across the screen from right to left, like a player piano roll unwinding. There are four marks: yellow circles for hitting the left drum, red circles for the right one, pink circles for tapping both at once, and little starbursts for handclaps. Your goal is to play the appropriate action when these icons move under a white circle at the left side of the screen. If you've seen or played Dance Dance Revolution, it's the same idea. There are also extended circles for drumrolls.

When I first started playing the game, I had fun. I played through the easy children's song "Bingo" and old classics like "I've Been Working On the Railroad." Then I tried some harder ones, like the pop song "Loco-Motion," and the classical "Hungarian Dance #5 in G Minor" (played with rock instrumentation). I even drummed to the song that has led tens of thousands of football fans to rock their stadium in a massive, co-ordinated clap-clap-thump, Queen's classic "We Will Rock You."

After playing through all of the songs, I was no longer having fun. I realized this was primarily due to four things.

First, some of the rhythms they had chosen were quite strange. About half the time I was feeling the rhythm of a song and drumming in time, and the other half it felt like I was almost drumming at random just to follow the markings on the screen.

Second, I found that the songs didn't complete. The children's songs played to completion, but many of the pop and classical songs played for only a couple of minutes and then faded out. Given that pop songs are generally only three minutes or so anyway, it was frustrating to not be able to play them to the end. Sure, Devo's "Whip It" gets repetitive, but I'd still rather drum my way to the end than have it just putter out somewhere along the line.

Third, the list of songs was small and the choices were banal. There are only 33 songs available to drum along with. Six of them are theme songs from Nintendo products. Most of the rest are children's songs, or pop tunes that range from "Rock Lobster" to "Louie Louie." Some songs seem to have been re-recorded by cover bands.

I expected that once I had successfully drummed my way through this first list of songs the game would open up a bigger, better list, but no. Instead, the game offers you three sets of increasingly difficult drumming patterns to master. So if you're willing to invest many repetitions and lots of practice you can memorize the patterns and totally nail the hardest level of "Inky Dinky Spider," if that floats your boat.

Fourth, the animation is disorienting. While you're playing, the background scrolls left-to-right while the icons are moving right-to-left. After looking intently at the screen for a few minutes (which you must do in order to keep up with the druming icons), your visual system compensates for this constant, opposing motion. The result is that when the song is over and the animation stops, your eyes keep going, and the whole world starts to swim visually back and forth, like an old-fashioned television dissolve effect. This disorienting and nauseating visual flow can take 30 seconds to fade away, and much longer for the feeling of seasickness to disappear.

On balance, I think the most anyone should expect of this game is an hour or two of novelty and amusement. After playing through all the songs once on the easy level, I think most people will be like me and put the drums back in the box, and sell the game on eBay.

Donkey Konga is a nice idea with unique hardware, but it falls far short of its potential due to to poorly-chosen songs, odd drumming patterns, and nausea-inducing animation.