May Contain Nuts

It’s always fun when I run up against an arbitrary limitation of an app…

While my mom and my brother were here in June, a fair number of photos get taken. Because of a lack of memory card space and the fact that at the time, my mom couldn’t find her camera cable and had no card reader anywhere else at home, I imported all of the photos onto my computer. For a variety of reasons, the content was burned to a DVD rather than a CD (it could have fit, but the CD-Rs I have all suck and my Mac hates them, and it honestly didn’t occur to me to use Ash’s Windows box), and mom happily took the disc home to share with family and friends.

The problem with this solution, however, is that I failed to realize just how far backwards my family’s computers are. I had assumed that my dad still had a DVD-ROM drive in his computer. Apparently, he doesn’t. And neither do any of the other computers in the house, working or otherwise. This makes it difficult to open the photos burned on the disc. In an illustration of my family’s technological naiveté, they tried valiantly to get the disc to play in the DVD player in the living room, obviously to no avail. So, I was called upon to work out a different solution.

The solution, as it happens, was to put together a DVD that could be played in a standard DVD player. So, I started off by making just a DVD of the stuff that mom had taken on the trip. I even burned it. However, it then occurred to me that, since I had SO MUCH space to work with on a DVD, and since I could conceivably even create a dual-layer DVD as of iDVD ‘06, I decided to do something crazy: I decided to include every photo and video that mom had ever taken and uploaded onto my Mac for lack of any other way to get stuff off her camera. This quickly spiraled out of control and has pushed my poor dual 2.3GHz G5 with a measly 1GB of RAM to its breaking point. It’s also pushed iDVD to its limits as well. I attempted to burn the DVD tonight and was unceremoniously informed that there was too much motion menu content in the project. After trawling around in the help files, I found out that iDVD only allows you to have 15 minutes of motion menu content (in other words, the total run-time of all of your menu loops must be 15 minutes) before it craps out. Since I had frivolously included several multi-minute tracks in the audio segments of some of the menus, I had unintentionally pushed the menu content to over 19 and a half minutes. I had also, through the application of a dissolve transition on every slideshow on the DVD, managed to press the whole project up against the 8.5GB (formatted capacity less ;)) barrier of a DVD-DL.

I think it’s rather strange for Apple to let you create up to 99 menus in an iDVD project, but only let you have 15 minutes of “motion” (whether anything’s moving or not, if you’re playing audio, it counts toward the motion limit) between them all. I’m curious if this is an actual limitation of iDVD’s assembly process, or whether it’s a limit imposed by the DVD format itself. Thinking about it, I’ve never really seen a DVD with 15+ minutes of “motion” menus, though admittedly there’s rarely more than 2 or 3 menus in any given DVD anyway, so it’s hard to say whether it’s an Apple issue or a DVD issue. Anyone reading this know if DVD Studio Pro lets you put more than 15 minutes of menu content on a disc?

Anyway, after removing all of those transitions and paring down the audio, the project now fits back on a single-layer DVD and iDVD will cooperate and burn it for me. However, in the process of writing this post and assembling all of the facts, it came to my attention that either there are a large number of missing photos from the trip, or I actually did waste a whole DVD on about 200MB of material due to our crap CD-Rs. So, while I had intended to get this puppy burned tonight and mailed tomorrow before going to Urupalooza, it looks like I’ll have to call home and see if mom actually did take just 60 or so photos before we dumped the card, or whether they’ll have to mail me the first DVD I made back here so I can actually get everything loaded onto the new disc.

Engadget has a review of the Zune’s glorious user experience (which, if you’re reading this through MystBlogs, Zib has already pointed out… thanks Zib for the link :)). I suddenly feel much better about the fact that my iPod Mini has gotten more difficult to use since the battery started going south… at least it doesn’t crash the app, and still gets properly recognized when I plug it in while the app is already running (although I do seem to have to charge it on a power adapter for several minutes before plugging it into the Mac, or it locks up… regardless of the battery life it says it has left on the screen).

I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks “Welcome to the social” is a retarded tag line, too. I was amused by this comment on the review: “Aside from making me throw up a little in my mouth, this catchphrase brings to mind little old ladies playing bingo. “

I’m even more amazed at the fact that MS put it in the software installer (along with “Release your inner dj…” what?), and the “hip” and “trendy” background images on the installer seem more than a little desperate (and occasionally gangsta, yo…).

Methinks I’ll be getting a video iPod when I finally get around to replacing my mini.

I have Apple’s hot news feed bookmarked in Safari, because they put their OS X Pro Tips in there once every week or so. Usually the rest of the stuff that gets dumped into the feed is just links to featurettes on how people and companies use Apple’s products, or product announcements that I really don’t need to read because I have no money ;).

Today, though, Apple announced they were providing a 30-day trial of Aperture. Because I was curious if this trial prohibited the use of said product commercially (i.e., since you haven’t paid for it yet, you can’t turn a profit off of it), I read through the terms of use for the trial. Inside, I found a couple of amusing little statements that seem to have been taken from a boiler-plate Apple EULA (and even then, it’s still kind of funny…):

THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.

I also found a nice little note on the extent of the grant of license:

This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on one Apple-labeled desktop computer and one Apple-labeled laptop computer so long as both computers are owned and used by you.

Finally, someone who realizes that people own more than one computer these days!

Courtesy of amon-re’s blog, A description of the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications application on Microsoft’s website states that Windows XP will present nag screens, show balloon tooltips in the taskbar, and lock the desktop of a system whose copy of XP fails the Genuine Advantage validation procedure. Microsoft goes on to say that one can view notifications using Add/Remove Programs, but that you cannot remove the notifications using said tool (which begs the question of why the hell they’re listed in Add/Remove programs…).

Finally, the page states that Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications will be deployed using Automatic Updates.

So, let me get this one straight… Microsoft is presenting pirates with nag screens, locked desktops, and notifications that their copy is pirated (or, to use Microsoft’s terminology, that they “may be the subject of software counterfeiting”) using a service which every Windows pirate on the planet knows not to use.

A brilliant plan.

So I decided tonight that I would shirk all my impending responsibilities and customize my Mac a bit more than it already has been. I installed the XCode tools tonight on a whim, and discovered that there was an ICNS-maker in the collection of utilities (for those unfamiliar with the concept, an ICNS file is the Mac equivalent of a .ico file in Windows, only a bit more involved). I whipped up Mac versions of several of the Myst Icon Project files Gandy and I made a couple of years ago, and set to work figuring out how to change icons on the Mac without buying a program to do it for me.

Evidently, changing icons yourself on a Mac is a bit more dangerous than doing so in Windows, as some of the icons are burried within system resource files, and editing them is always dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. Having learned my lesson from the time I deleted the /usr folder on my Mac while trying to remove a botched web service install (yeah, not the most intelligent thing I’ve ever done…), I proceeded with extreme caution, replacing one icon at a time at first, and re-launching Finder each time to ensure what I was doing wasn’t damaging. All of the default icon files are backed up within the system resource bundles, so changing them back won’t be difficult if I ever need to do that. But anyway, I dug around and replaced the default folder icon, the default text document icon, the .txt file ion, the .zip file icon (that one was a bitch and a half, as OS X’s ZIP extractor doesn’t show up on a Spotlight search, so I had to track it down manually), and the .mp3 file icon. I’ll probably do more changes as I happen upon icons that need changing, but for now, I’m satisfied. I also whipped up a new desktop background for use with the icon set, so I’ve got a shiny EoA shot of Atrus’s prison as my background now.

I plan on eventually having icons for most major file types (already do, actually, but I need to edit a few of them, and make scaled versions of them so OS X doesn’t drastically scale down the 128×128 version automatically), plus icons for hard drives, Windows-based concepts like Network Places, My Computer, etc., and Mac-based concepts like Smart Folders (though Vista will apparently have those too, whee…) and disk images. I’m probably going to leave the removable media icons alone for a long time to come, though, as well as some of the more obscure things you can hook up to your Mac, like Firewire hard drives, etc., mainly because this is a project with extremely low priority right now, and it’s sort of become something I’m doing in my own spare time for myself. If I ever get a complete enough set assembled for others to use on their own systems, I’ll put it out.

I’d also like to make desktops for each game. I’ve made some progress already by making Revelation and Exile desktops available on DPWR, but I’d like to support more resolutions, including widescreen displays, since those are becoming more common these days, and do new desktops for each Age in each game (with a collection for Riven, in addition to ones for Tay and Age 233). I’d also like to do each game in a different style, but coming up with 7 different styles (Myst, Riven, Exile, realMYST, Revelation, Uru, EoA) is gonna be tough. Part of the new style requirements come from simply needing to fill in space at large resolutions for the pre-rendered games, because there are no 1920×1200 screenshots of Myst available. I’m also planning on dropping support for the 640×480 desktops, as WinXP’s lowest default is 800×600, so that’s one less scale I’ll need to worry about (yay).

From the “learn something new every day… five year after everyone else” department…

I have discovered the Pattern Maker in Photoshop. Not the Edit->Make Pattern tool, the Filter->Pattern maker tool. I’ve zipped past that thing probably a zillion times in the 7 years I’ve been using Photoshop (assuming it was in version 4), and never thought to look into what it could do.

Me likey.

So Ash and I finished Shadow of the Colossus tonight, and as a result, my vocabulary has been temporarily reduced to mostly 3-letter words many ending in “uh”.

Yes, the game is that frakking awesome. I’ll be totally honest in saying that I don’t buy many games, partly because I have little money to devote to the hobby, partly because I have even less time, but mainly because frankly, not that many games really interest me enough to justify their $40-$60 price tags. After finding out about Shadow from a couple of sources, I tracked down a video review from GameTrailers.com and showed it to Ash. We both agreed that we had to go find the game and play it now, and man, were we ever right in doing so.

The game is only available on the PS2, ’cause it was developed by Sony and we all know how possessive Sony is of its IP. I have to say, it’s at the top of a very short list of console games I actually like enough to have felt justified in buying them. The vast majority of console titles simply don’t interest me, and as I don’t have an X-Box, a Gamecube, or even a PS2 of my own (we borrowed my brother’s for the purposes of playing Shadow), I feel I’m also justified in not really caring much about most console releases. I’m also not a huge fan of twitch games, mainly because I just don’t have the twitch reflex, so my field of games is basically limited to crappy adventure games ripping off Myst and… well… not much else. People need to make games I want to play, damnit!

Anyway, Shadow is really nothing sort of amazing. Despite the humorous jabs both Penny Arcade and VGCats have made at the game’s tenacious little bugger of a main character and the rather blatant weaknesses of the colossi, the game really is very engaging, and I think it’s safe to say it’s actually somewhat addictive too. For those not aware of this game, I’ll sum up the plot (sans spoilers) for you: A nameless protagonist arrives in a forbidden land in the hopes of bringing a young woman, his true love, back to life after she was taken from him. To accomplish this goal, a mysterious and disembodied voice commands him to defeat 16 colossi that roam the land, amidst a warning that what he asks will exact a heavy price. So, you spend the entire game tracking down and defeating these incredibly mammoth creatures - and they really do live up to the title of colossi - all the while gradually getting a little bit more of the story revealed to you, but at the same time, still utterly in the dark by the time the conclusion rolls around.

The visuals in this game are ridiculously awesome for being done on the PS2 (let’s face it, the PS2 is not the baddest current-gen console on the block), and are really ridiculously awesome just in general too. The landscape is immense (I believe someone from the SCEA port team noted that it was 12 square kilometers), and there are no loading times ANYWHERE while you’re exploring or kicking colossus ass (there are a couple at the very beginning, presumably to cache the world, and a couple during the finale, but they don’t get in the way at all), which is really amazing (and appreciated). The main character and his horse are also incredibly animated, and the horse especially is very - for lack of a better word at 8 in the morning - horse-like. The animators did a great job on the two of them (which is good, because they’re pretty much always the only characters on screen the entire game), and the one guy in charge of the colossus and horse AI (for whom I feel nothing but pity) did an equally incredible job bringing these creations to life.

I do want to echo the sentiments of Ursula Vernon, at least partially, in saying that killing these things is at times rather depressing, because a number of them do just mind their own business until you come along and start stabbing them in their glowy spots for the sake of resurrecting your sweetheart. Now, when they start shooting staff blasts at me (and their projectile weapons do look for all the world like Goa’ould weapons fire), then I get the feeling that these guys, at least, deserve to be dealt with in a not-nice manner, but the other ones seem perfectly content to walk, swim, or fly around and do nothing terribly threatening, and that, combined with the torturously wonderful but operatic music that plays as they collapse in a giant stone heap just makes you feel like a horrible person that a joint SPCA/National Geographic strike force is going to be after any minute now.

The music, as I alluded to above, is also fantastic. It only plays during cutscenes (all of which are rendered in-game) and while you’re fighting the colossi, but its sparsity lends it even more power. It’s largely low-key, until you hit the point where you’re clinging madly to a colossus as it tries to shake you off, when it does take on a bit more of an action-oriented attitude. However, it’s very appropriate, often melancholy, and the whole thing has a very minimalist orchestral feel to it, like there’s 20 guys playing in a massive hall, which grants the music a very echo-y quality that often only adds to the melancholy of the empty environments and tragic colossi death sequences. I wish to hell Sony would release the CD in countries other than just Japan, because I’d buy it in an instant.

I also want to echo the sentiments of Matt at MacHall comics in saying that anyone not convinced that video games can qualify as art (not necessarily do by default, but certainly can) should be forced to play this game before passing final judgement. I will say that it seems to follow in the vein of not having a Disney-happy ending when you’re done, as seems to be the tradition of Japanese culture (which I’m totally fine with, but damn, this thing should come with a warning, or at least a Prozac coupon), and the whole thing does have a very unified and artistically-oriented (no pun intended) feel to it. It really is an incredible game, and has a very complex ending in terms of the ultimate motivations of each character in the game.

I have absolutely no reservations in saying that if you own a PS2, there is no reason in the world why you shouldn’t buy this game (especially since it’s only $40… and get the strategy guide while you’re at it if you tend to suck at puzzling things out or just don’t want to have to worry about it sometimes). It’s amazing.

I should note, however, that completing this game after watching Battlestar Galactica and the unusually brutal Stargate SG-1 for this friday was perhaps not the best thing for our emotional well-being. Guh…

Whoa, lots of tags on this one…

So I’m sure everyone involved in the UU scene has heard about this by now, but for those who don’t pay much attention, I’ll briefly recap the situation…

Recently, Grey Dragon posted a note on Uru Obsession and at Cyan’s own forums regarding the modifications fans have made to Uru since its release, especially with regards to the development of fan-created Ages. It was pretty standard faire as far as notices go, basically stating that they need people to file for permission from Cyan’s legal department before developing - and especially releasing - any fan-created content, and that they want to get things straightened out before things get too much farther.

The biggest reason for this, I imagine, is that Chris Brandkamp apparently did not return to Cyan after they shut down in November, and with his departure, Cyan basically has to re-build their legal department, since Chris pretty much WAS the legal department. So, a few things that probably WERE permitted simply need revalidation, and any new projects obviously require their own permission granted.

I am, so far, at a loss to see why any of this comes as a surprise to anyone. It’s how Cyan has operated for the past 12 years: if you want to use their assets in a project of your own, you must ask first. That’s the rule, and always has been. I see no reason to be shocked that they’re actually enforcing it. Perhaps it’s the timing (which some consider exceptionally delayed in coming) that has thrown so many off. AFAIK, the UU hacks like the userKI and adminKI have been approved and now re-approved for use and distribution, so that’s not even really where Cyan’s concern lies. Their concern, it seems, very understandably lies in the seemingly exponential growth of fan-created Ages for the game. When you have a game so intricately tied to a story and history, fan-created content that creates inconsistencies in that story and history can become a real nightmare very quickly. Since there seems to be something afoot with Uru, which I don’t think Cyan was expecting to have happen so soon, they suddenly have to get their ducks in a row, so to speak, and make sure that they have a handle on what’s going on in the community. The implications of fans creating their own Ages which can be distributed online and plug into their engine are severe. Much more severe than any Half-Life mod could ever hope to be. You simply don’t mod an MMO - especially not one with such a strong central story to it… it’s not something that’s been done before (and please don’t cite There or SL, because they are a totally different situation). MMO modding is something that needs much more developer control than a stand-alone game does, because you’re dropping new content into the developer’s world where it will be equally accessible to everyone. Stand-alone games by default include a much greater understanding of the separation of original developer content and fan-created material.

What truly boggles my mind are the people who are fuming up the UO forums complaining about Cyan’s right to protect their own property, basically saying that they should be allowed to do whatever they want because Valve has already laid the groundwork with Half-Life, while completely ignoring the differences between Half-Life and Uru as well as the fact that Cyan is NOT Valve, nor is Uru released under the same license as Half-Life. I’m going to be frank in my opinion about these people, because I believe that they are doing much more harm than good.

Cyan has, through Grey Dragon, openly admitted their desire to work together with us as fans to expand our capabilities, and possibly our influence, in Uru:

We have been continually amazed with the persistence you have shown and hope in the future we can work with you. We truly hope this period of planning will be sorted out soon.

Now, let me be perfectly clear in saying that this offer of friendship will only last as long a we agree to play by the rules and restrictions that Cyan puts into place, even if we don’t agree with them. If we ignore Cyan’s wishes, if we disregard the trust that they have placed in us by not saying anything until now, we risk endangering that future relationship and losing EVERYTHING that all of these wonderfully talented people have worked for over the past two to three years.

I will not let that happen. It has and always will be my dream to work at Cyan someday, and if collaborating with them on a fan-based project that uses Uru as a basis can at all help (and I’m pretty damn sure it would), I refuse to let someone who thinks they know better than the IPs owner how to manage the situation stand in my way. I’m not going to be polite about this, because it’s not just my potential future, but the potential future of everyone in this community who has ever wanted to be a part of Cyan’s storytelling that is at stake here. If we ignore them on this, we could see a very ugly side of Cyan as they’re forced to crack down on those violating their requests and limitations in order to preserve the integrity of their story and whatever relationship they have with their mysterious financial backer (as I imagine that they are doing this as much for their backer as they are for their own protections).

We have been given miles and miles of free range through UU and its relatively unmonitored status over the past year and a half. Now Cyan has started posting speed limits and road signs to prevent things from getting ugly, and there are those who wish to ignore them or even go so far as to try and tear them down. If they persist, I can guarantee that it WILL NOT end well. Cyan has said clearly that their silence on an issue does not constitute approval, hacking the game is in violation of the EULA, and distributing modified files is in violation of the EULA in addition to the DMCA in the United States. Cyan has every legal right in the world to sue people for messing with their engine and their IP, but they haven’t. They’ve asked us nicely to submit any and all Uru-related projects to their legal department for approval just as we’ve done for the past 12 years. They’ve expressed their desire to work together with us in the future, possibly even allowing us access to better tools and the honor of having our Ages officially included in-game, to take the possibilities to their most extreme. But what do these people do? They whine. They accuse Cyan of living in the past (which confuses me, as the vast majority of games on the market do not support modifications to them). They badmouth them and assume without any knowledge of what they’re doing that anything else they create will suck, be unpopular, fail, etc. because of said “living in the past”.

I have only one thing to say to you people (and you know who you are): You are a bunch of spoiled children. Grow up and learn to play by the rules before you ruin the entire experience for everybody.

And for the record, despite the fact that there are apparently a number of folks out there who have developed an increasing dislike for anything and everything that Cyan does, and are excessively vocal about it in a totally non-constructive manner (yet somehow strangely still claim to be fans of their work…), it is still my ultimate goal to get a job there. Hopefully someday soon (note to self, make sure demo reel is ready by Mysterium).

Taking a brief pause in my ramblings about Phoenix, I thought I’d share something amusing from Microsoft. I was looking for Paul Thurrott’s Windows Supersite in an attempt to discern the latest about Windows Vista since I still can’t get the Microsoft keynote to play without stuttering (and for those curious, I watched the entire MacWorld keynote the night it went on Apple’s site without a single hitch). However, not remembering the guy’s name, the name of his site, or the address itself, I went for the first thing I remembered reading on his site the last time I was there: a comparison between iMovie and Windows Movie Maker 2. While I didn’t find the site through that search in Google, I did come across this page on Microsoft’s Australia site. presumably there’s a duplicate on the US site, but I can’t really be arsed to look for it right now.

Anyway, I’m just trying to figure out how old this page is, and who compiled it in the first place, because there’s some rather glaring erros on it, even just comparing WMM2 to iMovie HD (aka iMovie 5), which has been out for a year. For one, I can say from experience that iMovie supports analog input, you just have to have an analog to digital converter, which you’re likely to need on Windows machines too. I also count 15 transitions in iMovie 6, which, while still less than the 60 offered by WMM2, is perfectly sufficient for any project that you want to show even the slightest bit of professionalism with (seriously, who in the hell needs 60 transitions?). What version of iMovie had only 6 transitions? iMovie 4?

There are also 32 title settings, not 13 (still not 43, but again, there’s an upper bound to these sort of things before quality is sacrificed upon the altar of shiny). iMovie 6 also has 48 video effects, all of which are previewed in realtime at full size, a feat which I seriously doubt WMM2 can match (plus, since Microsoft is intent on comparing the volume of material in any given category, iMovie wins by default). I’m not even counting the additional 8 audio effects here.

Briefly skipping over compression because I’m having a hard time not laughing, we come to web publishing. While I’ve not messed with the myriad of settings in iMovie’s export sheet, iMovie 6 does support export to iWeb, which supports direct publishing to .mac. Since I’ve observed that Microsoft’s direct-to-web publishing tools tend to be restricted to MSN Spaces and other related Microsoft-owned servers, I think this one’s a draw.

Moving on, I think it can be safely assumed that this page is comparing WMM2 to iMovie 4, because iMovie 5 does support automatic movie creation. While I don’t doubt that Microsoft also has voluminous help tools and wizards, I don’t think I’ve ever successfully mastered movie creation in WMM2, and I only barely managed to figure out how to get the damn thing to export to NOT WMV format (something that it is horribly lacking).

I’m trying to figure out what the hell WMM2’s easy-to-use task-based interface is, since I can’t figure out how to use the damn thing and have authored at least 4 different videos of varying complexity and length in iMovie 5 (and yes, I have tried). And I’m gonna skip the Windows Media compatible thing because again, I’m having trouble not laughing, especially since Microsoft has recently dropped support for Windows media Player for the Mac.

Anyway, I think I will take a moment to laugh at the supposedly superior Windows Media compression technologies that Microsoft is touting, which are hardly universally accessible (at least, if you consider “universal” to mean “computers including those NOT running Windows). As I mentioned, I’m still not able to get the WMV stream of the Microsoft keynote at the ICES conference over a week ago without it stalling every 15 to 45 seconds. Windows Media Player itself is a bloated and utterly worthless piece of crap IMHO, and fails to play pretty much anything on the Mac platform, and unless you have the one specific codec out of the millions of possible bands and versions, you can’t play it on a Windows machine either, and good luck finding out what codec you’re missing… Quicktime also supports H.264, which is the compression technology that both blue-ray and HD-DVD have adopted for high-definition encoding of video content, and it does so out of the box. Windows Media Player, unless I’m mistaken, doesn’t even support the international standard of MPEG 4 yet, but rather Microsoft’s own form of the compression technique. “Industry leading” is hardly how I would describe Windows Media, though “Industry commanding” of “Industry dominating” would certainly be appropriate.

Okay, first, an addendum to the Revelation on Tiger 10.4.3 issue: if your came is crashing, try running it without depth of field and other atmospheric special effects enabled. Several people have reported success with this.

Now, on to the synth. From TK’s blog comes news of a remix album tribute to American video game composers, and as one may expect, the Myst games make an appearance. Perhaps surprisingly, they make a rather prolific appearance, accounting for four out of the fifteen tracks on the album. Earthworm Jim, Commander Keen, Doom (again, obviously ;)), 7th Guest, and Grim Fandango also make appearances. I’s a pretty fascinating album, even though I’m really only familiar enough with the Myst music to really recognize the themes that the remix is sporting.

As far as the Myst music is concerned, it’s pretty entertaining, though I’m still not sure the Myst theme works as acid jazz. It sounds really good in some places and not so good in others, but on the whole, the track is fun to listen to. There’s also a remix of the Exile main theme, which Jack Wall has actually heard, and amusingly described as “what it would’ve sounded like 20 years ago”. He’s pretty much spot on with the assessment, too… it’s very MIDI-esque, but it’s a lot of fun to listen to.

Personally, my favorite out of the Myst tracks is track 11, “Zappers Freedom”, which is a remix of the Catherine’s Freedom and Moiety Theme tracks from Riven (admittedly, some of my favorite Myst music from any game, so I may be slightly biased here ;)).

I recommend going and downloading this album immediately. It’s quite a lot of fun to listen to.