The Meta Game: Myst vs. Prince of Persia

[Zencyde]

We got a new game here for the WSGF community. This is here to encourage cooperative discussion and give us another way to engage our passions.

Someone comes on, posts a video game card and a comparison card. A challenger approaches, posts another video game card, and a discussion ensues. All users are invited to vote in the poll to be posted and engage in the discussion at large. Giving rep is also encouraged here.


To start things off, here's what I'm presenting:



Which of these games is more visually beautiful?

Myst
-OR-
Prince of Persia




I'm going to launch this discussion by pointing out the massive array of computers that Cyan had to implement to render all the scenes of this game. Because of the intense visuals presented, the game consisted of a large number of pre-rendered images. It presented beautiful scenery from many imaginative sources. Some of these scenes took massive processing time for just a single image.

[skipclarke]

And I will counter with...



Sure, Myst was beautiful, as a slideshow... Anyone can make great graphics if they do it one frame at a time. Prince of Persia was about lifelike motion, fluidity... Cyan may have made beautiful ray-traced scenes with a farm of super computers, but Jordan Mechner created lifelike motion almost single-handedly.

Anyone else, please take a side and join in the debate...

For those interested in joining in the discussion (or starting your own), you can get a deck at http://www.metaga.me. I'm hoping that this be an ongoing feature of the WSGF, to the point of starting a sub-forum for Meta Game discussions. Vote in the poll in the left nav, to help decide the winner.

[Zencyde]

While I'll concede that there is an art to fluid movement, particularly that of the pixel variety, it's difficult to deny the window into what futuristic graphics will hold that was given to us by Myst. It wasn't until the mid 2000s that we could come anywhere close to producing such graphics in real time on consumer oriented hardware.

But what I feel Myst really brings to the table is the fantastically unique worlds that were presented. And the dynamic array of styles presented in each world. That's what Cyan Worlds has brought time and time again, I feel, with the Myst series. The beauty is not just in the futuristic graphics, but in the surreal landscapes that you're allowed to explore. Myst is basically a 3-dimensional painting.

[sixshot]

I was stuck between the two but I sided with Myst since I played that and very little of Prince of Persia. Both are visually great in their own right. I love how smooth the animation is on PoP and it did wonderfully well for its time. On the other hand, Cyan's Myst game gave us a glimpse into a fantasy world... sure it was originally a bunch of 3D rendered graphics dithered down to make image loading faster on CD-ROMs... but that's what Cyan worked with. We didn't have a lot of 3D capable hardware at the time (or none at all? When did Voodoo came out?). So trying to make it fly in realtime is pretty much out of the question. It took the PC tech industry several years to get us realMYST. By then we've already transitioned over from pre-rendered stills to realtime rendered graphics.

There's just something fascinating about the world and lore of Myst... which the creators made 3 companion novels out of -- The Book of Atrus, The Book of Ti'ana, and The Book of D'ni. And the idea of being able to traverse between worlds using a book as a link is simple, obvious, and brilliant.

Considering both are fantastic titles, I won't be bummed out regardless of which title wins the poll.

[The_cranky_hermit]

it's difficult to deny the window into what futuristic graphics will hold that was given to us by Myst.

I'd say that Prince of Persia provided a window into the future as well, albeit in a subtler way. At the time, action games did not have realistic animation, or even detailed animation for the most part. 16-bit Mario and Sonic have two-frame jump animations, which are more like parabolic propulsion than any sort of athleticism. Prince has a frame of animation for every pixel he jumps. Mario and Sonic collect items by touching them. Prince bends down, picks up a bottle, raises it to his mouth, and arcs his neck backwards as the contents of the bottle go down. Nowadays, tons of games have realistic animations for every conceivable action. I've actually written a fair bit about this game recently, and why everyone should be familiar with it.
[plug]

That said, Myst is more beautiful and more aesthetically pleasing, hands down. Prince of Persia had fluid and realistic sprite animation, which is amazing considering the time, but nowadays just about everything has characters that are just as well animated, but in 3D, with detailed textures, and way more animations. Aside from character sprites, the game's aesthetic is functional but fairly unremarkable. In Myst, everything was pleasing to look at, and very few games since have had comparable creativity or art direction.

When did Voodoo came out?

3D-acceleration started to take off around 1996, but the graphics looked like this: