Confessions of a girl gamer... part 2

Transylvania

Do any of you guys remember Transylvania?  It was 1992, and my sister and I played this game together on our parent's computer at home... and were totally in love with the graphics. I mean wow, pictures we didn't have to draw ourselves!?  After the text-only games and the Intellivision experiences, these were pretty intense experiences!

I think for a few years, I didn't game too much - not enough time during high school, and only played games with my sister when I came home from college and had access to my parent's computer.  I don't remember playing a lot during those years (too much homework, track team practice, theater work, after school job, and clarinet practice.) And around 1993 or 1994, I found Myst. Once I left the world of text games and started with the graphics, I was hooked... and I never looked back.

Screenshot from Myst, released in 1993

This game totally changed the way I experienced video games. The graphics totally blew my mind (they were impressive for their time), and I was in my 20's, didn't care much for partying and loved computers, so many weekends and evenings were spent playing these types of puzzle-solving games. There was no violence (unless the story lines had them incorporated as part of a back story) and the idea was to solve puzzles.

If you've never played video games, you probably don't know Myst. But if you have, there's very little chance you've avoided it.  It seems to evoke emotions of one extreme or the other - either you loved it and swear that it revolutionized the gaming world, or you hated it and thought everyone else was nuts. I haven't met a lot of people who felt neutral about Myst.  In any case, I think you can now download the game on your iPod or iPhone if you want to give it a try yourself.

Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (and the dreaded avatar)

There were several sequels to Myst, which I made sure to play as soon as they were released. The graphics, of course, got better and better, and the first-person, slide-show style continued until the last installment, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, in which you could create your own avatar.

This caused an uproar for purist Myst fans - the player was supposed to be anonymous! Genderless! Faceless! I got the impression that die-hard fans felt like Cyan (the developer) was "selling out" to the more popular style of 3rd-person gameplay that was emerging at the time and not being true to the original Myst following.

I didn't care - it looked gorgeous, there were cool puzzles, a good plot line, decent soundtrack, and nothing jumped out and killed you instantly. As far as I was concerned, it was an awesome game.

There were also a few games that gave me nightmares. Blackstone Chronicles comes to mind - a creepy game that took you back into the memories of an old sanitarium, where you discovered the horrifying treatments of the patients through ghostly flashbacks and whispered echos in deserted hallways.  Again, nothing ever jumped out at you, but the sound effects of footsteps behind you or the sudden SLAM of a closing door were enough to make my heart jump in my chest enough times that I had to vow only to play during the daylight hours.

Blackstone Chronicles' creepy "treatment" room

Another along these lines was Dark Fall... another "only during the daytime" games that was the ultimate in creepy nightmare-inducing sound effects.

Dark Fall: The Journal (warning: causes nightmares)

But my favorite games were primarily along the Myst lines - imaginary worlds with adventurers with no memories, following a trail of clues and puzzles.  Schizm was one of my favorites. The concept was that the two main characters were split apart from each other and into two separate but parallel universes, and had to solve puzzles on either side in order to reunite and (inevitably) save the world.  Again, the plot line was good, but the graphics were what always sold me. Exploring areas, drinking in the ambiance, and figuring out puzzles to unlock new, visually-stunning areas were what drew me into the gaming world.

Schizm screenshot

C'mon, tell me this isn't pretty awesome for 2002!

Even the Zork line of games made a few appearances during these years, and to this day, one of my favorite games is Zork: Grand Inquisitor. This game was hysterical, and full of slapstick humor, character actors, and even flashbacks to the original text adventure game that was, for a true fan of the genre, a geeky high.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor revisits the little white house with mailbox.

Another one from 1998 was called "Sanitarium" which began in, yep, an insane asylum-gone-bad. (What is it with me and evil mental institutions that I find so darn entertaining?)

Sanitarium - the starting screen

I had never heard of this until several years after it was released, and didn't get to play it until well past the operating system that it was programmed for.  As a result, I played Sanitarium in four-minute increments - I had to save every four minutes because the game crashed every five. If I didn't save, I would lose my progress. So I literally played this game four minutes at a time, shut it down, rebooted, and played four minutes again. (Try it sometime, it's irritating.) But the game was so engaging, and so well written, well-conceived and executed that I played the entire thing all the way through, and it was worth it. And that is really saying something right there.  It was a slight departure for me personally, since the graphics weren't as drop-dead gorgeous as the other games I loved to play.  But it caught me up in its talons and even with the technical nightmares, to this day Sanitarium is one of my all time favorite games.

Sanitarium again